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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


= = F Sere 








THE MEANING OF 


PSYCHOLOGY 


BY 


C. K. OGDEN 


Magdalene College, Cambridge 


Director of “THe INTERNATIONAL 
Lisrary or Psycuotocy, Pui- 
LOSOPHY AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD,” 
Gna -Lastor of Psvyone:: 





QPLLUSTRATED 


HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 


THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 





Copyright, 1926, by 
Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the U. S. A. 





B-C 


CONTENTS 
CHAPTER I: PRELIMINARY 


PAGE 

Reasons for the Study of Psychology ...... I 
TOONY NAT ATCAVY CD niyo ys. shu GOMUeRCa La AN Sd a ke ells I 
DEV CUO) WEGT EN eae oe Creu Mey yng ratty We oc git s 2 
Brave. can De improved ster semi. Gey tee) 2 
fore mind 1s a-starting-pomntyrcs aun onc %, 3 


The Subject Matter of Psychology—The Genetic Ap- 
proach— Technical Distinctions— Adaptation — 
Consciousness— Images— Ideas— Emotions—In- 
stincts—The Unconscious—Metaphors and Facts 5 


CHAPTER II: THE MIND AND THE BODY 


Mind, Soul, and Spirit. The most interesting of all 
questions. The restrictions of the term mind. 
Intellectualist traditions. The psyche and the 


BOIS Poe oi eee ake 19 
REVERE EM COTIES 5) eee fa ns | Mh a elt 20 
1. Materialism and Behaviorism ....... QI 
SreAminisi and Interactionism <3... ess ye 23 
Gmataven-neuralbarallelism, i 7a 6s). ern 24 
Pe ppenomenaism) 66h. Weel eee eels 24 
5. The Double Aspect Hypothesis. ...... 24 
PEEL te a VON ISIN 5 eo yo cehys iene Role ae hs Bi SH 
7. The Double Language Hypothesis ..... 26 
Mew ewaCIClenta tions: ieih cuc pukloace re teller one 27 
Advantages of the Linguistic Solution ...... 31 
(Phe Interchanece of Methods’). yale eee ees 32 
TT ee ed eterna Mee celPa eb atian olka utah ol is 34 


Vi CONTENTS 


CHAPTER III: IMPULSE AND INHIBITION 
PAGE 
The Action of Neurones. The Body as a Society 
of Cells. Co-operation and interdependence of 


TISSUES Ce ue EOE Sc a cS 36 
The Interaction of Neurones. Synapses. The nerv- 

ous impulse. The variety of its possible paths . 38 
The Conflict of Impulses. The unity of the nervous 

system. Precedence amongimpulses .... . 40 
Adjustment through Clearing-houses. Rivalry. The 

final common path i joa Wie eer ele g 42 
The Importance of the Head. Cerebral localiza- 

tions) Brain centers sna eee ioe ee eae 43 
The Spinal Cord. ‘Spinal’/reflexes) 20... 50.02: 46 
Inhibition. The scratch-reflex. The innervation of 

opposed muscles. Inhibition asa cutting off . . 47 


Four Theories of Inhibition. The humeral theory, 
the drainage theory, the refractory state theory, 


the chronaxy theory: Yoyo eile a 50 
Chronaxies. Neural tuning. Impulses and influ- 
ences, . Post-inhibitory.rebound?, a0 /ane) sae 52 


CHAPTER IV: HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 


The Relation of Higher and Lower Levels. The sort- 


ing.out of excitations V7 C ieneav eat eee 56 
Receptive Centers) 7a? 2 an ae ae eee $7 
Co-ordination Centers (este, Fives ue 58 
Association Areas) i) yee baa herrea ie miasmne 58 
Expectation. Back-wash influences. Receptive set- 

TINGS 6) Oe A ae Se ee hae 60 


The Influence of the Past. Memory, retention, and 
recollection 470400) Seay makes Gah reat ee eee 62 


CLO WeT ENDS 


Retention and the Conditioned Reflex. The forma- 
tion of habits. The substitution of stimuli. Con- 
ditioning in the dog. The salivation reflex. The- 
ories of conditioning . Fister 

The Image Theory. No agra areliviest Images as 


processes . . . Ie et a ORR 
The Theory of fewerca Ravstaace But they rise 
Leech re Cay a Ne 


McDougall’s Drainces Theory Preccire meeayhors 
misleading. Facilitation, fatigue, and the return 
of resistance. Purposive action and psychical 
guidance. Theendstate... . en 

Success as Establishing Attunement. The ee Sa 
of the co-ordination center. Failure as destroy- 
ing attunement 


CHAPTER V: PURPOSE AND INTEREST 


Purpose and Foresight. The present effects of the 
future through the past Mili 

Retention and Attunement. Engrams . 

Recognition. The identification of a tune 

Interest and the Selection of Patterns. Daminane 
activities, urges, ae wants, desires. Their 
outlet in action ee gts ha, a REN 

Man’s Fundamental Necdet) Primitive and deriva- 
tive needs. Parasitic needs 

Fixations. Pathological developments. ..... 

The Nature of Interest. Unconscious interest. 
Quantitative aspects. Interest as activity 

Discrimination. Stupidity and sensitiveness . . . 

The Initiation of Action. The incito-motor centers. 
The will. The co-ordination of movement. The 
preservation of balance and orientation .... 


70 


74 


Viil CONTENTS 


CHAPTER VI: THE GROWTH OF THE MIND IN 
ANIMALS 


PAGE 
The Comparative Method. From the simple to the 
COMPIEK? oY Sle Fe ee alee ee 93 
The Nature of Instincts. Heredity. Congenital 
endowments. Instincts not immutable. Modifi- 
cation ‘by experietice ))25.. (Akane re ee 94 
Instinct and Intelligence. The Weerpley of acquired 
and congenital dispositions. Intelligence and ap- 
propriate Tesponse )2 7 ou, Gea ene 96 
The Process of Learning. The pecking of the 
chicken. Acquirement of meaning. What is ac- 
quired. Habit. Theinfluence of the result . . 97 
The Modification of Responses 5 22. es 98 
Retention and Foresight. Objections to mere reten- 
tion as the explanation of learning. The explana- 
tion of foresight. The probable consciousness of 
a chicken. Retention and the unconscious. In- 
telligence and instinct not rivals ....... 100 
Trial and Error. Experiments with puzzle boxes. 
Theories of Learning. The Laws of Effect, Re- 
cency, and Exercise. ‘Blind’ selection from among 
possible instinctive responses. The objection to 
this. Neither situation nor response remains iden- 


tical. The experience in achievement ..... 103 
Perception in Cats. The formation of a perception. 
‘This: the clue*to learning isi 1 ee IOS 


The Gestalt Theory of Perception. Instances of Ge- 
stalt. The present vagueness of the theory . . . 108 


CHAPTER VII: THE MENTALITY OF APES 


Kohler’s Apes. The problem of understanding. The 
influence. of discouragement: 4. 4). a) fae eee lil 


CONTENTS iX 


PAGE 
The Construction of Tools. Kohts’ ape. The op- 
tical chimpanzee. The double stick experiment. 112 
The Process of Discovery. The réle of exercise, re- 
cency, and Effect. The formation of new config- 


urations. Habit and stupidity. ....... 113 
Building Experiments. The chimpanzee’s lack of 

gO Core eT ip me Rae ne IN FS Nag. 
Needs.and Instincts. Innate and acquired needs. 

Pgo-instincts andisex-instincts | eh ae! 119 
The Classification of Instincts. McDougall’s list. 

Blended and secondary emotions ....... 120 
A. More:-Fundamental Division 2.0. 2.0.0.0. 122 
ELIE At a ee See eR ae amNY GN LEK ae egg ce 123 
The Value of McDougall’s Scheme. Vitalistic im- 

DC AHONS Ele) oa). eae: eee nate a Sa): 124 
The Dangers of Anthropomorphism. The broody 

BCT 2 aR eS 125 


The Social Life of Apes. Loneliness, prestige, mass- 
attack, savoir faire, solicitude. Absence of imagi- 
COSINE D1. aS Ga Ons aR ee Pure ye ea emeea es NLA 127 

Animal Friendships. Guilt. Sexual behavior . . . 129 

Terror and Curiosity. Effigies, photographs, and 
NEES pele A ee SE ae SER EN, Coad) D 130 


CHAPTER VIII: MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN 


The Development and Uses of Imagery. Free im- 

ages in animals; and in the child. Complexity of 

the image. Its close relation to perception . . . 132 
Imagery and Desire. The emotional character of 

imagining. Wish-fulfillment. Dangers of phan- 

fasy eu etactical imagination 20. rg ae 135 
icmopverothe: Ghald fii = oS oper a en aise $7 
Play. The peculiarities of the child’s world . . . 138 


Xx CONTENTS 


Infantile Perception. His early recognition of ex- 
pressions. Growth of perception governed by 


growth ofintereste()°0!)! oe a armen net mei 
Primitive Mentality. Universal belief in sorcery. 
Natural law for the savage 22.) . , fie 


The Play World and the Real World. The absence 
of illusion. The child’s life as a multitude of 
pieces Mai. ST Be GACY WM sane ih op 

The Conflict with Reality. Play and games. Day 
dreaming ‘oi 0) 45 0 See ne ae ace coe 


PAGE 


139 


141 


144 


145 


CHAPTER IX: MAN’S LINGUISTIC HERITAGE 


Speech. The fundamental factor in the making of 
IAB se si ae NE RR a eae 
Expressions and Names. Speech originally a mode 
of action. Its use in thought a later achievement 
Early Stages of Communication. Emotive inter- 
course. The first classifications emotional. Prim- 
itive names as parts of things. The co-operative 
use of. languape 7). 010) Aer na ane 
The Child’s Conquest of Speech. The first words as 
expressive cries. The most important discovery of 


our life... The naming/activity ay Le 
Imitation. Close connection between hearing and 
speaking. Singingininfants ......... 


The Dominion of Society. Our dependence upon 
tradition. Group psychology. The group mind 
theory... AO ee 

The Virtues and Drawbacks of Language. Its mis- 
representations. A bulwark of outworn tradi- 
tions. The unreflective use of ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ 
Catchwords and formulas. The precarious tenure 
of civilization ‘65/1/22 43Niaie oe ee 


149 


149 


CONTENTS 
CHAPTER X: BEHAVIOR 


The Historical Background of Behaviorism. Chang- 
MR VIEWS OF INSTANCE si) it ae Ui Nha ag) ail ei eliss ie 
The Nature of Observation. The limitation of psy- 
chology. Consciousness as a meaningless term. 
Observations as causal sequences. The grounds 
for denying consciousness 8h re Beh ia) ek es 
Self-observation. The difference between having 
consciousness and observing it ........ 
The Status of Consciousness. Its rejection ground- 
less. Reasons for the denial. The unsatisfactory 
nature of introspection. What is valid in Be- 
haviorism. Conditioning. Difficulties with hu- 
man subjects. The study of ‘new-borns’ . . 
The Methods of Behaviorism : 2... 2.060. 8 
The Origins of Fear. What the infant is afraid of. 
The denial of instincts. A fearless humanity. 
BEAUIVATION Ah ce yh ok ae a e PORES Cule) JONaL Le 
The Unconditioned Emotions. Fear, rage, and love. 
Their original stimuli. Possible rapprochement 
between behaviorism and other schools of psy- 
le i's ae Pm RC a ay eeu ns 


CHAPTER XI: LOOKING INWARDS 


The Elusiveness of Consciousness. The mystery of 
mind. Interrogating consciousness. Four prin- 
PPR CRTIOIS Gi yet cay ay Gai tn apt sh hore 

The Distorting Influence of Language. The distinc- 
tion between hypothesis and fact. The dangers 
PARES ROCIO od ara iva alcatel natin te 


Hypotheses and Abstractions .........-. 


Xl 


PAGE 


161 


162 


164 


170 


Xil CONTENTS 


The Conscious Subject or Self. Experience belongs 
to selves. Detached fragments of experience. 
The theory of the irreducible subject, or soul. 
The theory of the self as the body . Aes 

The Localization of Experience. Images, percep- 
tions, and emotions. Anomalies. Referred pains . 

The Self as a Mnemic Bundle. The background of 
consciousness as the momentary self . . . . 

The Dynamic View of the Mind. Mental processes 
in place of mental atoms and elements . ; 

Disturbance and Recovery of Equilibrium. Adapta- 
tion and Attention . : Be ese tts ide 

The Ultimate Modes of Gonscionenees Knowing, 
feeling, and striving SULT ach wed bats 

Striving and Desire. Striving not an awareness . 

The Unity of the Mind. The independent study 
of cognition. Presentationism. Sensations and 
sense-data i.5..% (soy he | aa, ee ee Ae 

Shock. Response as adjustment ; 

The Process of Introspection. Difference heeween 
the introspection and the experience which is in- 
trospected. The reliability of introspection . 

The Mental Masquerade. Disguised experience 

Pleasure-Unpleasure. The affective aspect of con- 
sciousness. Its connection with striving. The 
emotions as composites. Success and failure 

Pains an eyo PN A AER 9 Aah Fag nae 

Aesthetic mttidene The union of varied impulses 

The Span of Attention. Distraction and absorption. 
Unconscious noticing Be amity Pye aie eh 

The Limits of Consciousness. Attention as con- 
scious interest. Unconscious interests. The ex- 
tensinn of the funds of introspection. ..... 


PAGE 


200 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER XII: LOOKING OUTWARDS 


Our Knowledge of the External World. Perceptions 
as responses... Sensations 2. sects let ks) eal ys 
Illusions of Sight and Touch. Rival theories 
Eye-movements. Dizziness. The location of sounds. 
The semicircular canals. Our sense of orienta- 
tion. The indirectness of perception ..... 
Recognition. Perception of forms. Recognizing 
familiar things in unfamiliar aspects . .... . 
Sign-interpretation. The development of percep- 
tion. Equivalent aspects. Influence of interest 
and of the-relevant-situation: Wary cles 64 ete 
General Consequences. Scepticism due to the in- 
directness of perception. We construct our world 
The Psychology of Fictions. Subjective distortions 
of reality. The contribution of language. .. . 
Fictions in Modern Physics. The universe as a re- 
RECTION Ol OULsEl VES: GES a8 sae kisah am kl elcae 
PREURANV OLE IStAS CH! co. cy Uk ebm mn i otra Steel a's 
The Human Equation. The projection of our feel- 
ings into the world. A self-critical psychology 


CHAPTER XIII: HOW WE THINK 


Ideas. Their representative function. The Wiirz- 
EOL ine sc vous, ct aap bees CNT GL aa tens 
Images. Their part in thinking. Types of imagery . 
RCE OL igi seh ee cae wk a Veen ANO eu oC 
Representation. The picture theory. What is know- 
ing? The causal theory. Thinking as experimen- 


XU 


PAGE 


215 


XIV CONTENTS 


PAGE 
Association. The law of contiguity. The direction 
of interest. Irrelevance and inhibition. Forget- 
ting. Resistance to new ideas. Concrete and ab- 


stract' thinking” 5.0). 5: gen tee ee 229 
Concepts. Parallel between perceiving and conceiv- 
ing... Individual differences inleveis "2 5 30. 231 


The Influence of Language on Thought. The uses 
of symbols. The multiple functions of speech. . 233 


CHAPTER XIV: EMOTION AND CHARACTER 


Emotional Reverberation. The Lange-James hy- 


pothesis 0 60 aia 6 L  ee e 238 
The Sympathetic System. Its three divisions. The 
adrenal glands iii 0) Ce ne ae ile tea aha ea 239 


Criticism of the Theory of Organic Resonance. Ex- 
perimental counter-evidence. Emotion in anzs- 


thetic patients: 4 Wid ss VR a een an 242 
The Disguise of the Organic Response ...... 245 
Projection. Empathy. The attribution of esthetic 

qualities (io) .cvi.! SiS aiily Deas ivan edie IE Bh ue iar aes 245 
Tnciprent Actions: ie: (6) oe i iaie aes rae es 247 


Conflict and Emotion. Pathological and groundless 
emotions. Emotional moods. Co-consciousness. 248 
The Unconscious. Repression, anxiety, elation . 249 
Belief and Doubt. Beliefs as dispositions and as 
experiences. The effect of nitrous oxide . ... 252 
Deliberation and: Resolve svi itm. iste cs eens 254 
The Sentiments. Complexes... ...... 4% - 254 


CHAPTER XV: HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG 


Character and the Unconscious. The growth of 
personality. Forerunners of psycho-analysis. . . 256 


CONTENTS 


The Mutual Obstruction of Interests. Early trans- 
formations. The child’s relations to other people . 
The Freudian Theory of Sex. Infantile germs of 
the later sexual interest. Their growth and uni- 
fication. Transferences of special sub-trends. 
The love of money, of domination, of self-display . 
The Complexity of Sex. The attitude of dispas- 
sionate inquiry. Perversions, sublimation, and 
Iniptted development) sss s ih een eet 
The Cdipus Complex. The child’s attitudes to his 
parents. The simplicity of his interests. His 
PYSvernal CHOUDD EN omni ime rene tN 
Berovection and introjection sy vie. cb ete Wan eins 
The Riddle of the Sphinx. Infantile sexual theories . 
Conflict and Repression. The desire for approval . 
Regression. Confusion and dilemmas. Solution by 
PE VORIDIMen tis a pee yee A IN CR ONT Gh 
Mechanisms of the Unconscious. The status of the 
bepresscr wish. Neurosesy ) yur iien gra i aoa og 
AYLI  GE7S 9 PSR er eae ta 8 ee eR eS 
Dream analysis. The dream as a compromise. Pic- 
torial and metaphorical thought. ....... 
Transference. Its outcome in marriage .... . 
Organ Inferiority. The willto power ...... 
Moral re-education. Indecision. The troubled con- 
ete ern ee Ss ir Saag RR BEN RY 


CHAPTER XVI: THE ABNORMAL 


The Borderland. The difficulties of verification 

Suggestion. Impulsions and obsessions. Faith- 
healing. Will and imagination. The effort to go 
SUFEU Za 5° Bi ER A OR Eat aS 


XV 


PAGE 


257 


258 


260 


262 
262 
263 
265 


268 


270 
271 


273 
274 
277 


278 


279 


XV1 CONTENTS 


Hypnosis. The concentration of attention. Being 
in love. The delayed conditioned reflex. Passes. 


Ansesthesia < . o)00 Ve eee en te 
Hyperesthesia. Lyeless sightmum eres eee 
Post-hypnotic Suggestion o)).) sanee ee are rae 


Telepathy. Possible physical explanations. Clair- 
voyance. The trance. The collective uncon- 
SCIOUS Yrs. is) w ethelh Vip eRe ae eS te 

Dissociation. Mediumship. Automatic writing 

Facial Asymmetry. Versatility. Genius. .... 

Alternating Personalities) 2%. Wyse 2 ee cea 

Calculating Boys; 2/7) hee ee ee 

Musical Prodigies © uses) eee ie ape me 

The Inheritance of Genius #2) oe es ee 

The:Great Abnormals> Gi ee 


CHAPTER XVII: LOOKING FORWARD 


Man’s Protracted Infancy. His social heritage. 
The amateur. mother!) pent ee 
School Education. Suggestion and Imitation. The 
two linguistic opportunities. 7. 2 J. 0.» 4 
The Transfer of Training. Insight and mastery 
The Case Against Education yee) 6 gu ee 
Vocational Training °.) / 4500 eee 
Incentives. Competition. The self-regarding sen- 
timente 5. ow fea ge 
Mental Types. Traditional classifications. Jung’s 
theory. Endocrine balance. Physique. Race . 
Mental Tests. Objective methods of comparison. 
Uses and abuses) 06) G0 pen, Scene 
The Future of Communication ......... 
The Need for Conscious Control ........ 


PAGE 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 
HN LG heey cate crx Ws pun ude amir ag “a ES 37 
12 2B) ID UA OU A te ROR IO tte an, ga 4I 
(ta. Mina) ae SR em at Se Rn 0 A A 45 
LUCE LAW a AAS tes ag ER DIM SOTA a ok a IN 49 
SEL SU ldaae adatrep ta ale Pun eee a LDS PLAT Re Hae 64 
| TARTS UA BO UCR ere CER PT oc en gp: 
SE NT EASE Sih aac as PU pene Se ae mie a 109 
SCLC EO BS Eos Tee Gs ee aM RA PRS RS a ae WL 193 
REC SOMM chs Uae se o's, ge a eae arp Sid 4" 204 
Eiicy DS LSE PCAC ele Saat en amnee ee Pena egy AUK ee 205 
eS TSG A ARR RE UG ac a enue aid 206 
Pires: 2G RLY SAAS ee am na ape ane tats eMac tte 207 
Pee gee eal te og pa IN Nera ere anh a 292 
LC ANE eS A GRE METER ECR EEN Ns alate 298 

PLATES 

Be ee eo NT ae ae Facing p. 118 
BOM RR hy) dic Veo oh gee an eo e 124 
Vi) Ss SOP a oa teh ‘ 126 
Re CR oy eee rir 298 


dese rah, | 
sil ir ok 


at 





PREFACE 


A FEw years ago the word Psychology was a 
technicality covering a field of inquiry in which none 
but specialists and perhaps a few enterprising teachers 
were expected to take an interest. But at the present 
time it would be hard to find a general reader of 
current literature who has not at any rate browsed 
through one or more of the books on psychological 
topics which appear every other day. 

There are, however, among these readers many 
who feel a difficulty in comparing and combining 
together the views, opinions, and information thus 
casually obtained. Although interested, they have 
no leisure for the study of voluminous works on first 
principles. They would like to read Shand’s 
Foundations of Character, Marshall’s Consciousness, 
Mitchell’s Structure and Growth of the Mind, 
Wundt, Lipps, and Stumpf, Hobhouse’s Mind in 
Evolution, Dumas’ Traité, the Analytic Psychology 
of Professor Stout (having dipped perhaps into a 
volume with almost the same title by Dr. Jung), 
Urban’s exhaustive treatise on Valuation, Baldwin’s 
Thought and Things, or Professor Ward’s Psycho- 
logical Principles; but they have no ready means 
of discovering which is about what. 

It seems probable, therefore, that many who are 
seriously approaching Psychology for the first time, 
and who are vaguely aware that many hundreds of 

X1X 


XX PREFACE 


important volumes have appeared since the last of 
these works was written, will welcome a brief account 
of the nucleus of accredited opinion from which 
the growing science is tending to develop. In what 
follows will be found an endeavor to deal in the 
simplest possible language with the subject in the 
light of the most recent advances; and to deal with 
it more concisely than has been done by any com- 
prehensive introduction hitherto. 

My object, however, has not merely been to cover 
the field on accepted lines. No conscientious teacher 
could to-day put his own Outline forward without 
taking account of the existence of admirable sum- 
maries such as those of Woodworth, Warren, Mc- 
Dougall, Stout, Angell, Hunter, Pillsbury, Yerkes, 
and Titchener. Each of these has its own advantages, 
and it would be no service to the public to attempt 
to combine their distinctive merits, or to forget that 
the two volumes of William James’ Principles are 
generally accessible for reference with their abun- 
dance of unsurpassable descriptions. Nor can the 
physiological side of sense-perception, or the statisti- 
cal handling of intelligence tests, for example, be 
usefully described in brief compass. For these the 
reader will be better advised to go direct to the 
original authorities, and I have therefore appended 
a short Bibliography of works available in the English 
language for his guidance in fuller reading. 

It would be gratuitous to pretend that psycholo- 
gists as a body are agreed on many fundamental 
issues. On this point the first fifty volumes of the 


PREFACE XX 


“International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, 
and Scientific Method” or the pages of The Psycho- 
logical Review, on which much of the present work 
is necessarily based, are alone conclusive. The reader 
who compares this Outline with right- and left-wing 
works such as Fox’s Educational Psychology (1926) 
on the one hand, and Watson’s Behaviorism (1925) 
on the other, will also be able to judge to what degree 
departure from tradition or undue conservatism is 
in evidence in the following pages. 

There remains always the probability that some 
apparent differences of opinion are actually but dif- 
ferences in formulation; this aspect of the problem, 
however, has already been discussed in The Meaning 
of Meaning (1923), to which the present work 
might serve as a stepping-stone for the linguistically 
inquisitive. On this occasion I have had the advan- 
tage of discussing numerous points with my former 
collaborator, Mr. I. A. Richards of Magdalene Col- 
lege, Cambridge, to whose Principles of Literary 
Criticism I also owe much. 

C. K. Ocpen. 


Roya Societies Cus, 
St. James’s STREET, 
January, 1926. 





THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


i 


Ke Ley 
y Win be? 


* 





THE MEANING OF 
PSYCHOLOGY 
vs 
CHAPTER I: PRELIMINARY 


Reasons for the Study of Psychology. There are 
four and a half good reasons for studying Psychology 
seriously. 

There are many more reasons for studying it 1n 
other ways. It may help us to pose more readily 
as profound thinkers, to write more telling advertise- 
ments—or resist being taken in by them—to detect 
failings in our friends, and to discover new Wonders 
in our Offspring. But none of these things will 
carry the student through two hundred and fifty 
pages. Fortunately there are stronger motives. 

1. Wuat are We? Psychology is the only means 
by which this momentous question can ever be fully 
answered. Conchology cannot do it, nor yet Ontol- 
ogy: nor can Physics. Physiology can only help us 
in part. Only by a study of that portion of us which 
we call the mind can we ever learn what the mind 1s. 
This may seem a simple saying, but its significance 
has only lately been generally accepted. Psychology 
is the youngest of the sciences, and the most attrac- 
tive: 

“© latest born and loveliest vision far 
Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy” 


I 


2 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


says Keats in his “Ode to Psyche.” The study of the 
psyche, of mental processes, besides its universal ap- 
peal, has this further advantage that we each carry 
perpetually about with us all the subject matter 
which it requires. 

2. We co wronc. Even if we do not, we are al- 
ways in a position to say with Richard Baxter: “there, 
but for the Grace of God, goes Richard.” And psy- 
chology is beginning to point out both how we may 
avoid disaster and how regain the right track. The 
labors of Gall, Esquirol, Carpenter, Maudsley, Char- 
cot, Ribot, Hughlings Jackson, Stanley Hall, Goltz, 
Creighton, Ferrier, Havelock Ellis, Janet, Freud, 
Adler, Rivers, and a thousand others have already 
made modern psycho-therapy a powerful resource 
against the worst afflictions to which man is liable. 

3. WE CAN BE IMPROVED. If the reader was ever 
a child he will fully realize how much room for im- 
provement not only we, but our outworn educational 
methods, allow. “It is quite true,” wrote Professor 
James Harvey Robinson in 1921, “that what we need 
is education, but something so different from what 
now passes as such that it needs a new name.” And 
in the last five years the Walls of the World, the 
bounds of human imagination and knowledge, have 
again been swept back by the further triumphs of 
Einstein, Eddington, Jeans, Rutherford and Bohr; 
while at the very heart of our being new and intri- 
cate mechanisms and possibilities are being revealed 
by fresh applications of such researches as those of 
Pavlov, Bose, Lapicque, Westermarck, Malinowski, 


PRELIMINARY 3 


and the newer psycho-analysts. At the same time 
international, economic, and social affairs, and the 
contacts between minds, between types, races, and 
classes, which they entail, grow ever more bewilder- 
ing. When confronted by these problems, or by our 
ignorance with regard to them, we must confess our 
inadequacy. We must learn how to learn—and our 
name is Legion. Democracy must face its problems. 
New millions of participants in the control of gen- 
eral affairs must now attempt to form personal opin- 
ions upon matters which were once left toa few. At 
the same time the complexity of these matters has 
immensely increased. The old view that the only 
access to a subject is through prolonged study of it, 
if true, has consequences for the immediate future 
which have not yet been faced. The alternative is 
to raise the level of communication through a direct 
study of its conditions, its dangers, and its difficulties. 
The practical side of this undertaking is, if communi- 
cation be taken in its wide sense, education.’ 

4. Tue Minp ts a Strartinc-point. Psychology 
ultimately provides a basis for all other studies— 
Ethics, Economics, A‘sthetics, Ethnology, Grammar, 
Politics, and Mathematics. Even Physics is ulti- 
mately drivenbackon hypotheses which are essentially 
matters of psychological criticism and construction. 
All our research is the exercise of our thinking powers, 
and in the long run the test for thinking lies with 
those whose business it is to study the processes of 


The Meaning of Meaning (1923), by the Author and I. A. 
Richards, p. xxx. 


4. THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


thought. This has, of course, always been realized 
by those physicists whom the world acclaims as at 
once the most prudent and the most daring; and in 
Chapter XII quotations will be found which illus- 
trate their views. 

To turn to the science which seems the most re- 
moved from Physics—namely Ethics. As fashions 
have changed in psychology men’s theories of the 
good have followed them. This is inevitable, for 
ever since the days of Aristotle it has been agreed 
that only experiences* can be ‘good? or ‘bad,’ and 

in describing the differences between good and bad 
experiences it is desirable to know how experiences 
may differ. The most commonplace view—“The 
greatest happiness of the greatest number”—no less 
than the most transcendental, “Se/f-realization”, de- 
pends upon discussions which figure largely in every 
psychological treatise. Indeed, such a work as Wes- 
termarck’s Origin and Development of Moral Ideas 
has led many to an Ethical Relativity in which the 
whole problem of morality reduces to a study of 
human types and desires in their social setting. 

Nor is the science of the Beautiful (A®sthetics) 
capable of being divorced from Psychology. What 
we are really talking about when we criticize a poem, 
a picture, or even a statue are essentially the states 


* The reader who is approaching psychology for the first time must 
not be disturbed by the special associations which certain simple 
terms such as experience (= ‘a terrible experience’), sensation (cf. 
‘sensational’), and even perception and adaptation have acquired in 
daily life and in the press. He will soon get accustomed to their 
more general uses. 


PRELIMINARY 5 


of mind (including pleasure, emotion, ecstasy, syn- 
zesthesis, and so forth) which they cause in us, so 
that the central problem of Atsthetics is to decide 
which of the states of mind that arise as our response 
to a given work of art are relevant. 

Finally, as Mr. Belloc wrote: 


“The Path of Life, men said, is hard and rough 
Only because we do not know enough. 
When Science has discovered something more 


We shall be happier than we were before.” 


If this be really true, Psychology, in virtue of its 
unique position among the sciences, would gain 
another half point. 

The Subject-Matter of Psychology. Clearly, how- 
ever, Psychologizing is not one of the ‘instincts.’ It 
cannot be embarked on ad ovo, or from the cradle. 
Introspection (Lat. introspicio = look inward) is its 
main instrument, and a certain amount of training 
is necessary in introspection as in most other pursuits. 
Before commencing a detailed study we may make a 
brief preliminary survey of the field. The subject 
matter of Psychology is perhaps best indicated by 
an example. 

As the reader reads these words he will probably 
agree that many things happen “‘in his mind.” 

He attends to the marks on the paper, he thinks 
and understands, he takes up an attitude, he remem- 
bers, he 1s interested or bored as a consequence, his 
instinct of curiosity is perhaps aroused, or possibly 
he is w#ritated by the obscurity of the style. He 


6 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


endeavors to persevere, until eventually he feels 
tired, and to avoid pain he falls asleep. But even 
then he may dream, and on awakening may forget 
his dream—though if hypnotized he may rescue it 
from the unconscious. 

All these are psychological events described in 
current psychological language, and in psychology 
we are either engaged in classifying such events and 
elaborating our descriptions of what takes place, or 
in seeking for their causes, 4.¢., explaining why just 
that particular process took place at just that time 
in just that way. 

The Genetic Approach. The first of these, classi- 
fication, is academic psychology—useful when 
wanted, but receding in favor of genetic (Gk. 
genesis = origin) and causal treatment. By genetic 
treatment is meant the treatment which seeks for 
light upon the things with which it deals through 
the study of their origin, their history and develop- 
ment. When we thus approach the mind we find 
that the importance of past history is far greater than 
it is with physical processes. A teacup, for instance, 
is little affected in its behavior by what has happened 
to it in the past, though the researches of Sir Jagadis 
Bose on responses in metals and plants show that the 
phenomena of biological memory may be more far- 
reaching than has hitherto been supposed; certainly 
nothing that a mind does, or that can be done by a 
mind, is unaffected by its previous experience. 

It is, in fact, the first principle of psychology to 
recognize the peculiar way in which experience 


PRELIMINARY | 


leaves effects behind it. Whenever we think of 
anything as being this or that, there are, as Professor 
Stout puts it, “processes of interpreting, identifying, 
classifying, recognizing, etc., by which the object is 
brought into relation with the results of previous 
experience as retained and organized in performed 
dispositions.” Just what these dispositions are we 
shall have to consider later in this work. Similarly, 
anything we do by habit we do only thanks to our 
past experience. Thus we never think or feel or 
act quite freshly and spontaneously, for the character 
of our thinking, our feeling, and our acting is always 
due, in part at least, to the ways in which we have 
thought and felt and acted in the past. What exactly 
this dependence in any particular case may be is the 
main question which psychology attempts to answer, 
and it is chiefly in order to trace these connections 
more easily that it adopts a special vocabulary. 

Technical Distinctions, Popular language in all 
matters that are connected with the mind is apt to 
be vague and misleading. Psychologists have, there- 
fore, felt obliged to introduce terms freer from ir- 
relevant associations than those in ordinary use, and 
these often make the subject seem dry and abstract 
to the beginner. But if it is realized that they are 
only names for what must from the nature of the 
case be processes familiar to everyone as part of 
ordinary experience, a little patience is all that is 
necessary for the mastery of current opinions. 

Thus we find Psychosis (‘state of mind’, and some- 
times ‘abnormal state of mind’: much as phenome- 


8 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


non = ‘appearance’ and sometimes ‘abnormal appear- 
ance’), Conation (striving), Volition (will), Affect 
(feeling), Cognition (knowing), Engram (impres- 
sion), Presentation (sensation), Ideation (thinking), 
Hedonic tone (pleasure-pain), Endo-somatic (inside 
the skin), Coenesthesia (sensibility of the whole 
body); and so on. Some of these terms will of 
course be found in the present work; others are not 
of much use. 

Adaptation. From the most general standpoint, 
the business of the mind is to adapt the organism to 
its environment. The process of continual change 
from adaptation to adaptation is what is known as 
Conation (Lat. conor=try). In cases where there is 
conscious effort this process is popularly known as 
‘willing.’ It is, however, now widely held that there 
is no essential difference, beyond a difference in com- 
plexity, between automatic responses to the environ- 
ment and those responses which, owing to a conflict 
of tendencies, seem to involve the efforts of some- 
thing which may be called the ‘Will.’ There are 
difficulties in admitting such an agent as the Will 
into psychology as a science, but on the view that all 
mental change is conative, we must of course admit 
that we are ‘willing’ even when we are asleep, and 
much of the work of modern psychologists, such 
as Freud, is devoted to showing that we constantly 
have volitional (Lat. volo = wish) processes of which 
we are unconscious. The ‘libido’? which now appears 
so prominently in psycho-analytical writings, is a 


PRELIMINARY 9 


name for this general striving activity, which 
throughout life is never suspended. 

How this stream of striving proceeds in any in- 
dividual depends partly on sensations impressed by 
the external world, but also partly on internal fac- 
tors. Certain of the latter are of particular im- 
portance, because their character determines the direc- 
tion of the stream. It is to these factors the terms 
| Instinct, Impulse, Interest, Need, refer. Pleasant- 
ness and painfulness clearly play a great part in con- 
trolling our behavior, and this pleasure-pain aspect 
of experience is what is generally spoken of as feel- 
ing-tone. 

Consciousness. Where in such an account does 
consciousness (Lat. conscio = know) appear? It can- 
not be too clearly realized that much of what is 
quite properly to be called mental activity is not con- 
scious. Only some of the elements involved have 
the peculiar character which we name consciousness. 
But we should be careful when we use the term 
‘element.”? A mental state is not built up of items as 
a wall is of bricks. This is an error which has long - 
haunted psychology, and is known as associationism 
or atomism. What were supposed to be the bricks 
were mental occurrences of two kinds, sensations and 
images. They have received a disproportionate 
amount of study because they are the mental events 
which are most easily introspected. Sensations are’ 





"In this form the statement is highly controversial. We raise the 
point here because it is important that the student should realize as 
soon as possible that the basic assumptions of psychology are still 
- matters of dispute. The alternative views are discussed in Chapter II. 


Io THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


happenings in the nervous system, due to stimuli 
from outside the body, e.g., in vision, or to the stim- 
ulation of one part of the body by another. A tooth- 
ache, or a colic, is the same in its mode of origin as 
the sensation obtained, e.g., by clenching the fist. 
The importance of these sensations, due to the ac- 
tion of one part of the body on another, will be clear 
when we come to discuss emotions and they have 
much bearing upon the growth of self-consciousness 
and of our knowledge of other minds. 

It is obvious that not all effects of stimuli are, or 
give rise to, conscious perceptions. What may be 
the difference between effects which give rise to con- 
sciousness and those which do not is a matter upon 
which no light has yet been thrown. It illustrates 
the relative unimportance of the idea of conscious- 
ness in psychology that this problem is rarely dis- 
cussed. Consciousness is supposed to be associated 
with the higher parts of the nervous system, the 
bringing in of these higher systems accompanying 
the act of attending. It is plain that attention may 
make conscious what has hitherto been present but 
unperceived. If we keep our eyes motionless, we 
can discover, by merely attending to the edges of 
the field of view, that we are all the time seeing far 
more than we are ordinarily conscious of seeing. 
Similarly with all our senses. Without changing 
anything in our stimulation we can bring into explicit 
awareness much that lies ordinarily outside it—e.g., 
the feel of our clothing on the skin and the rhythmic 
tension and relaxation of our breathing. Thus at all 


PRELIMINARY II 


times there is a large field of inattention (stimula- 
tion not attended to) which is affecting us without 
- causing consciousness. 

Images. The other kind of ‘element’? which in- 
vites introspection is the age, the representative of 
perception which occurs without the stimulus re- 
quired for the perception. A great deal of work has 
been done on images since Galton’s Inquiry into 
Human Faculty drew attention to the vast range 
of difference between individuals both as to the 
images they habitually employ, and as to their 
powers of forming imagery of any kind. To-day, 
however, psychologists of all schools lay less stress 
upon images as an essential feature of mental life; 
and there are some, such as Professor Watson, in his 
Behaviorism (1925), who deny that any kind of 
imagery is necessary, or indeed occurs at all. There 
is also an interesting controversy as to how far 
thought can be conducted without it. But in most 
people all kinds of imagery undoubtedly occur— 
visual, auditory, tactual, olfactory, gustatory, motor, 
kinzesthetic, thermal, and organic. In fact, it is pos- 
sible to form images corresponding to every kind of 
sensation. 

The reader should discuss imagery with his 
friends, getting them to describe what they see when 
they imagine—e.g., a monkey riding a bicycle, and 
asking them to give the monkey a top hat with a 
red rosette, etc. He will find that they differ greatly 
both in the vividness of their imagery and in their 
power of controlling it. It seems likely that special 


I2 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


powers of imagery in one direction or another are 
due in large part to early trends of interest; and if, 
as seems probable, various abilities depend largely on 
these trends and the imagery to which they give rise, 
it should eventually be possible to avoid much dis- 
appointment and waste of time due to the later 
selection of unsuitable occupations. 7 

These great differences between the types of 
imagery which are employed by different people 
raise a special problem, as to how far people with 
different imagery can be said to have the same 
thoughts. If my consciousness is filled, say, with 
mental pictures (visual images) and your conscious- 
ness is filled with the mental echoes of the sounds 
of words, how can we be said to have the same 
thoughts? And yet there is plainly a sense in which 
people who use quite different images can be said 
truly to be in agreement, to be thinking similarly. 

Ideas. This problem, which is very important 
both historically and theoretically, is the same as the 
old question, “What is an Idea?” when this question 
is asked in Psychology. The full answer is very 
complicated, but an outline may be given which 
shows how the difficulty we have raised, which would 
result from an attempt to identify ideas with images, 
may be avoided. 

For this purpose we require the biological notion 
of adaptation with which we began. All thinking, 
all mental activity, occurs in the course of adaptation. . 
When we have an image, the actual occurrence (which 
appears to us as an image) is a step in an actual or 


PRELIMINARY 13 


possible adaptation. It is a repetition of a step in 
a previous adaptation, namely, that which we made 
when we had the original sensation of which the 
image is sometimes said to be a copy. 

An adaptation involves something to which we are 
adapting. If, for instance, I am thinking of St. 
Peter’s by means of an image of its dome, and you 
are thinking of it by means of the words ‘St. Peter’s,’ 
we shall each be adapted to something. If this is 
the same, then we can be said to be thinking of the 
same thing, and so to be having the same thoughts 
—1.é., adaptations—the same ideas, in spite of the 
difference in our imagery. Thus an idea (an am- 
biguous word which is synonymous with a ‘represent- 
ation,’ a ‘conception,’ a ‘concept,’ a ‘notion,’ or a 
‘universal’) is a way of thinking applicable to some- 
thing, and as is implied by the term ‘adaptation,’ all 
‘thought’ is determined by the necessity of reacting 
to situations and determines action of some kind 
or other. 

Emotions. We may now, bearing in mind this 
idea of adaptation, turn to the active side of mental 
processes, to striving, and consider instincts and the 
emotions. The distinctive feature of emotional as 
opposed to other experience is the presence of certain 
organic sensations, due to physiological changes in 
the internal organs of the body, such as a quickened 
pulse and arrested breathing. These, or images of 
them, give their peculiar flavor to experiences such 
as anger, fear, love, or wonder. 


14 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Instincts. But it must not be supposed that these 
sensations are all that constitutes such an emotion as 
anger. We have to examine the causes to which the 
sensations themselves are due. We then find that 
there are apparently a small number of primitive 
drives or inborn arrangements of the organism, which 
lead it to respond to special situations in a special 
manner. These are, or may give rise to, the so- 
called instincts. Thus if a jaguar rushes suddenly 
upon us, our instinctive adaptation takes the form of 
flight. But to facilitate flight the internal condi- 
tions of the body (the heart-beat, the breathing, the 
glandular activities, etc.) are modified; and these 
modifications give rise to the sensational part of the 
emotions above indicated. In other words, we are 
sorry, as James put it, because we cry, rather than 
vice versa. But a fly in the eye will make that 
organ water, yet we do not necessarily experience 
grief. That is to say, it is only bodily sensations, 
instinctively originated, which constitute emotions, 
or ‘affects,’ as they are often called by modern 
writers; and there is much more in an emotion than 
a mere organic disturbance. In some such way as 
this the chief objection to William James’s view, 
namely Stout’s contention that a stomach-ache is not 
an emotion, is avoided. Yet it is fairly clear that 
instinctive activity may be unaccompanied by emo- 
tion in the sense in which we have used the term. 
Some, however, would maintain that emotions do 
accompany such instincts even when not consciously 


PRELIMINARY 15 


experienced, but are “in the unconscious” to which 
we may now turn. 

The Unconscious. The recognition, chiefly since 
the opening of the present century, that most of our 
mental life has not the character of consciousness, 1s 
responsible for much of the present popular interest 
in the subject. The laws of the interconnections 
of conscious ‘elements’ had been elaborately studied 
a hundred years ago by writers like Hartley, and al- 
ready by the time of John Stuart Mill it seemed un- 
likely that much more could be added. Authorities 
like Bain were producing definitive treatises on the 
intellect and the emotions, and, though there were 
sporadic attempts to found a science of animal psy- 
chology, and laboratory methods were being de- 
veloped, it hardly appeared possible to do more than 
put the finishing touches on so monumental a struc- 
ture. 

At this point morbid psychology, through the work 
of medical men and alienists, specialists in the treat- 
ment of those whoare beside themselves (Lat. alius= 
other), began to force upon the attention of the 
official representatives of the science the necessity 
for fresh hypotheses. 

As so often, advance was due to the fresh stimulus 
provided by strange occurrences for which accepted 
theories could suggest no explanation. Hypnotism, 
alternating personalities, automatic writing and 
psychical research, hysteria, phobias and neuroses in 
general, particularly those relating to sex, became the 
central points of interest. Resemblances between 


16 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


the phenomena of dreams and those of mental dis- 
eases led to a completely new account of what hap- 
pens in the mind when conscious control is relaxed. 

The facts thus brought to light show that only a 
small part of our mental life is under conscious con- 
trol, i.e., controlled by processes which are them- 
selves conscious. This has emphasized the fact that 
consciousness is the exception rather than the rule 
in the processes studied by psychology. In dealing, 
however, with “The Unconscious’ which is becoming 
too ready a resource in psychological difficulties, the 
first necessity is to decide precisely how we are go- 
ing to use our language. Most discussions of the 
unconscious proceed as though there were two dis- 
tinct realms, the conscious and the unconscious; as 
when it 1s said that what was in the unconscious can 
be brought into consciousness or what is conscious 
may be repressed into the unconscious. The mind is 
thus regarded as composed of separate strata, and in 
addition to the Unconscious we hear of the Sub-con- 
scious, the Fore-conscious, and so forth. This meta- 
phorical language is convenient for some purposes, 
but no clear understanding of the problems can be 
reached unless we are prepared to go behind such 
verbal devices. 

Metaphors and Facts. The result of rash specu- 
lations on the contents of the Unconscious has been 
a revival of almost medizeval views of ‘possession’ — 
whereby from time to time the personality is invaded 
and occupied by what amounts to a separate spirit. 
Or, as Bertrand Russell in his Analysis of Mind well 


PRELIMINARY i 


puts it, “the unconscious becomes a sort of under- 
ground prisoner, living in a dungeon, breaking in 
at long intervals upon our daylight respectability 
with dark groans and maledictions and strange ata- 
vistic lusts”; his own view being that an unconscious 
desire is merely a law of our behavior, namely, “that 
we remain restlessly active until a certain state of af- 
fairs is realized, when we achieve temporary equilib- 
rium. If we know beforehand what this state of 
affairs is, our desire is conscious; if not, unconscious. 
The unconscious desire is not something actually ex- 
isting, but merely a tendency to a certain behavior; it 
has exactly the status of a force in physics.” 

Arising out of the metaphor of ‘force’ in physics 
we have an extensive metaphorical vocabulary of im- 
pulsions, resistances, impacts, pulls and pushes, which 
at a certain level of analysis have their usefulness, 
but are carefully excluded by the physicist from any 
exact statement. Similarly, we may use the meta- 
phors of ‘unconscious desires,’ ‘the censor,’ ‘repressed 
complexes,’ and we then get the following represent- 
ative psycho-analytic description of a dream: “The 
barriers of the Freudian unconscious are less tightly 
closed during sleep, and elements from behind these 
barriers, as well as ordinary elements from the fore- 
conscious, from the marginal zone, and from the 
primary unconscious may all play their part.” It 1s 
hardly necessary to point out that all this meta- 
phorical language will vanish as the science advances. 
But just as the scaffolding erected by builders is 
often more interesting to the public than their final 


18 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


architectural achievements, so the psychology of de- 
sire and memory in its early stages has lent itself to 
a picturesque treatment which, now that its work has 
been done, can profitably be discarded. 

With these general considerations before us we 
may come to grips with our subject by introducing 
the momentous problem of Mind and Body. 


CHAPTER II: THE MIND AND THE BODY 


Mind, Soul, and Spirit. Upon the most interesting 
of all questions, “What is the mind?” psychologists 
are as yet by no means agreed. And it is unlikely 
that any amount of mere discussion and argumenta- 
tion will lead to agreement. More facts are needed, 
and time for a realization of the bearing of these 
facts upon the general problem. The question has 
not yet become, as it must if it is to be solved, a 
purely scientific matter. Men’s prejudices, prefer- 
ences, and desires still intervene to make cool judg- 
ment difficult. 

It is usual in psychology to include under the term 
‘mind’? what in ordinary speech would be regarded 
as special attributes relating not to thought alone, 
but to the ‘emotions,’ the ‘passions,’ the ‘affections,’ 
the ‘heart,’ to ‘intuition,’ to the ‘soul,’ and to the 
‘spirit? Popular opinion often assumes that these 
things are distinct from mind, which is regarded as 
chiefly concerned with the intellect, and it is some- 
times convenient to distinguish emotion and will as 
‘spiritual,’ and thought or intellect as ‘mental.’ But 
all these, as we shall see in Chapter XI, are, of 
course, inseparable aspects of the same stream of 
activity. 

Even psychologists, however, have felt that the 
too exclusive preoccupation of academic thinkers 
(such as Mill, Mach, Meinong, Moore, Marty, and 

19 


20 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Maier—to confine ourselves to one letter of the al- 
phabet only) with intellectual analysis has unduly 
warped the subject, and that some term more com- 
prehensive than ‘mind’ might be desirable. The term 
‘psychical,’ as applied to ‘psychical development,’ 
‘psychical qualities, etc., has long been familiar, 
though the advance of Psychical Research, the study 
of supernormal mental phenomena, has tended to 
give it and particularly the word ‘psychic’ a super- 
natural tinge. 

But if we oppose the brain to the ‘mind? in its 
narrower sense, some more general term, the ‘psyche,’ 
would be opposed to the body, the ‘soma,’ as a whole; 
it need hardly be pointed out that an experience is not 
connected solely with the brain, for the stomach, and 
the solar and sympathetic ganglia (Chapter XIV), 
may be playing their part. The indiscriminate use 
of technicalities is to be deprecated, and the bandying 
about of such terms as ‘endo-somatic? where ‘bodily’ 
would do just as well is one of the vices of latter- 
day experimentalists. In this work the term ‘mind? 
will often be used, for convenience, in a compre- 
hensive sense. | 

The Seven Theories. To approach psychology 
through the Body-Mind controversy is one of the 
best ways of going quickly to the heart of the mat- 
ter. Many conflicting views are still held by 
thinkers whose opinions are worthy of respect and 
consideration. The number of theories theoretically 
possible as to the relations of mind and matter is, 
it may surprise the reader to learn, only seventeen, 


THE MIND AND THE BODY 21 


and the parent of many of them” slays six of his 
offspring in a single paragraph; but of those which 
concern the psychologist only seven are of impor- 
tance. 

(1) MarerriatisM anp Benwaviorism. There is 
the view of the Behaviorists and the Materialists that 
what appears to be mental is in reality physiological 
processes. Thinking, for example, according to 
Professor Watson, is swb-vocal talking; that is to say, 
silent internal discourse—very slight muscular move- 
ments in the organs of speech or elsewhere in the 
body. Mental events, on this view, simply do not 
exist. What has always been regarded as experi- 
ence, as the working of the mind, is an illusion, like 
the malevolence attributed by the savage to a pistol. 
All that we do is to respond by activities of our 
muscles and glands to the situations which we en- 
counter. The main motive of this school is a pas- 
sionate desire to avoid all mention in psychology of 
items which are in the least degree obscure or in- 
accessible to standard methods of observation. This 
is a laudable desire, especially in view of the extent 
to which unverifiable speculations have occupied psy- 
chologists in the past, but it has led to a bias as ex- 
traordinary as that which it was designed to avoid. 

Moreover, there can be no doubt, and Professor 
Watson and his fellow Behaviorists should be the 
last to deny it, that the happenings in our brains and 
more generally in our nervous systems are at least as 
important in ‘thinking’ as any movements which we 


C.D. Broad, Mind and its Place in Nature (1925), pp. 611-612. 


22 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


make. It is true that it is still more difficult to 
discover what exactly these happenings are than to 
observe muscular movements. Yet Watson’s ‘sub- 
vocal movements’ are themselves at present not ac- 
cessible to observation. Their sponsor has lately 
extended the doctrine. The sub-vocal movements 
which are ‘thought’ itself need not, he now holds, oc- 
cur in the throat. Movements in any other part of 
the body may, by ‘conditioning’ (see Chapter IV), 
take their place. We cannot be certain that an in- 
dividual is not engaged in thought unless we are 
certain that no such movements are taking place in 
him. 

The inaccessibility of happenings in the nerves, 
with which we shall be much occupied in the follow- 
ing chapter, is not a good reason for denying that 
they are the essential things in thinking. Thus the 
majority of neurologists (Gk. meuron=nerve) give 
the movements so much stressed by Behaviorists a 
subordinate place and regard mental events as being 
actually processes in certain parts of the brain. To 
quote a popular account of this doctrine: ‘As soon 
as ‘mental states’ are resolved into reflexes among 
some of the 10,000,000,000 cortical neurons, it be- 
comes obvious that the word ‘mind’ is no more than 
shorthand for neuronal action and interaction when 
influenced from the outside or by internal stimuli.” ? 
When Materialism is inverted we get the various 
forms of Spiritualism (philosophically termed Ideal- 


“Morley Roberts, Warfare in the Human Body (1924), p. 229. 


THE MIND AND THE BODY 23 


ism) according to which matter is an illusion and the 
only ‘reality’ is mental. 

(2) Animism aND INTERACTIONISM. In vigor- 
ous opposition to the materialists are the Animists 
(Lat. anima=soul), of whom Professor McDougall 
is the most uncompromising. They maintain that 
whatever may be the status of these material phenom- 
ena, however far neurology may go in explaining 
the processes which occur in the body, none the less, 
there is a mind or soul also: a spiritual thing utterly 
different in nature from the body, which imteracts 
with the body, being affected by it and likewise af- 
fecting it. The old view that the Conservation of 
Energy made this interaction impossible is now aban- 
doned; but the nature of the interaction which occurs 
remains so obscure, owing to an ignorance both of 
mind and of body, that the doctrine is at present al- 
most without significance. On the other hand, there 
are many phenomena—from a dose of chloroform 
to a cure at Delphi—which, if we are not too particu- 
lar about knowing exactly what we are saying, may 
seem clear proofs that mind and body act after one 
another. None the less, both the psychologist and 
neurologist are reluctant to accept this view because 
it would involve for each the intervention in his 
science of factors which in no way belong to it; and 
the more closely either psychology or neurology is 
studied the less place there is in either for extrane- 
ous explanations. 

Various hypotheses have been devised to avoid 
either of these opposed positions, to escape both 


24. THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Materialism and Animism. The most widely adopted 
is Parallelism. 

(3) PsycHo-neuraL Paratietism. According 
to parallelists there is a mind quite distinct from the 
body, but mind and body do not influence each 
other in any degree or at any point. Instead, it is 
supposed that every event in the higher parts of the 
nervous system is accompanied by a mental event, 
and vice versa. The two streams, neural and men- 
tal, run parallel to each other, but in complete in- 
dependence: like two clocks, back to back, keeping 
time. This is perhaps the safest view in psychology; 
on the other hand it does not fully satisfy many 
of its adherents. 

(4) EpipHENOMENALIsSM. On this view mind 
would be a by-product, an epiphenomenon, of neural 
processes, not reducible to such processes, but still 
quite unable to influence them. It would be like a 
phosphorescent glow due to the neural processes 
which would go on regardless of it; or, to adopt a 
perhaps more appropriate metaphor it would be like 
the light emitted by an arc-lamp as the current passes 
across the gap between the carbons. This view, asso- 
ciated with the name of T. H. Huxley, has lately 
receded somewhat in favor of 

(5) Tue Dousrte Aspecr Hyporuesis. Both 
mind and brain might be equally real, neither re- 
ducible to the other but each of them ‘aspects’ of some- 
thing else. Both what we experience—i.e., our men- 
tal processes—and what others, if they could look 
into our heads, would observe, are on this view 


THE MIND AND THE BODY 25 


equally signs of more fundamental happenings. The 
very same event which appears to me as my thought 
would appear to you, if you could see it, as my ner- 
vous system in agitation. The evident disadvantage 
of such a double aspect theory is that the funda- 
mental happenings are left in such obscurity. They 
would seem to be things we could know nothing 
about. 

(6) Neutrat Monism. To avoid such unknow- 
ables, a new suggestion has recently been put 
forward by Bertrand Russell. Mind he reduces to 
sensations and images, and these are regarded as prob- 
ably reducible to physiological events; at the same 
time his treatment of matter, including the body, 
turns the universe into sensations and sensibilia—.e., 
possible sensations. Thus the two meet in one 
(Gk. monos= one) kind of neutral stuff, those changes 
in this stuff which follow psychological laws being 
mental, those which follow physical laws being phys- 
ical. Much interest is certain to center round this 
view, which is, however, far from representing a 
stable position. 


It is fortunately not necessary for psychology to 
decide at the outset between these rival hypotheses. 
Almost all its results can be stated in terms of any 
of them with more or less trouble in different cases: 
and perhaps the most interesting point in the con- 
troversy is the extreme difficulty of finding any facts 
which might decide between them when apparent 
differences due to the prejudices which they invite 


26 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


have been eliminated. This circumstance has sug- 
gested a seventh view which is much akin to the 
Double Aspect theory and is gaining ground. 

(7) Tue Douste Lancuace Hyporuesis re- 
gards neurology and psychology as being concerned 
with the very same facts, but concerned to describe 
them in two different languages. 

A child thinks that an orange looks yellow and 
has a size when there is no one there to see it. But, 
as Professor Mitchell well puts it, the orange “is a 
real thing which we only know in this physical or 
sensory way. Our own mind and its experiences we 
may know in this way as the brain and its processes, 
and in this way other people can know us equally 
well, or better than we know ourselves. But we 
also know our mind and its experience directly, and 
this no one can do but ourselves, who are our mind 
and have its experience.”* Every remark in the 
one science can theoretically be translated into terms 
of the other. The two accounts deal not with dif- 
ferent aspects of some further unknowable event, 
but with the very same event, which is known in 
two ways: directly, in introspection, when we are or 
enjoy an experience; indirectly, in neurology, when 
through the interpretation of signs we infer an event 
in the brain. As Professor Piéron in introducing 
his masterly survey of modern research, Thought 
and the Brain, admirably remarks: 

‘Whatever certain theorists may assert to the con- 
trary, neurophysiology does undoubtedly often 


* Structure and Growth of the Mind (1907), p. 22. 


ak Go EN DAN Dette 8 Oo Dy 27 


provide an adequate representation of the laws es- 
tablished by psychology; the study of the functions 
of the brain frequently supplies satisfying explana- 
tions of psychological phenomena. In fact, we often 
pass from one form of representation—or rather, 
from one form of expression or language—to the 
other. 

“To these and similar advances made by science 
beliefs will always adapt themselves. If it is a ma- 
terialistic doctrine that seeks support from the new 
data, the adaptation presents no difficulty. But even 
a spiritualistic creed, if free to remold certain ar- 
ticles of faith, could well accept the facts now es- 
tablished. There will always be a sufficient residue 
of the unknown for scientific facts to be accommo- 
dated to the various systems of beliefs; and in any 
case the mind can always take refuge in a transcen- 
dental idealism.” 

The New Orientation. Neurophysiology, on which 
so much of our understanding of psychological proc- 
esses is based, is no longer studied only by scientists 
who mistrust the contribution of the student of mind. 
Medical men with a wide and intimate experience of 
human behavior both in health and disease are daily 
throwing light on problems of thought and emotion. 
The neurologist who has to grapple with the in- 
tricacies and implications of aphasia (loss of speech) 
or of epilepsy is to-day competent to meet psychol- 
ogists on their own ground. And on the mind-body 
problem the modern neurologist is for the most part 
in agreement with Professor Piéron: 


28 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


“The tendency either to take an extremely psy- 
chological or an extremely material view of certain 
forms of sickness is partly due to the old conception 
of causation in the etiology of disease. . . . The in- 
tegration of the nervous system, the integration of 
the endocrine system, and the integration of the con- 
scious and unconscious realms of the human psyche, 
are not independent phenomena. Man is the su- 
preme integration of every system, nervous, vascular, 
glandular, or psychological.”* And, adds Dr. Kin- 
nier Wilson, editor of the Journal of Neurology, 
“to interpret psychological phenomena in terms of 
bodily movement is a truly objective method... . 
The psyche must be interpreted and understood in 
terms of action and behavior. . . . And by action is 
meant not only voluntary movements and speech, 
but also implicit action such as bodily postures, at- 
titudes, gestures, tensions, and autonomic disturb- 
ances” (Ibid, p. 344). 

Many adherents of the Double Aspect formula- 
tion would probably subscribe to the Double Lan- 
guage view if they considered the alternative more 
closely. Thus Professor Warren assumes “that con- 
scious and neural phenomena constitute one single 
series of events, and that their different appearance 
is merely due to different ways of observing them”; 
but he does not posit a further something of which 
both are aspects. “Consciousness,” he continues, 
“belongs to’ the activity of neurons as truly as the 


* The Journal of Neurology and Psycho-pathology (editorial), 
vol. i, 1920-21, p. 165. 


Bykov EN DY AN Dy Erie BODY, 29 


intensity or form of neural impulses belongs to this 
same activity... . They form part of the ‘total 
description’ of nerve activity.”* And it is signif- 
icant that the Gestalt psychologists “consider mind, 
or rather mental processes,” in the words of Profes- 
sor Koffka,” “not as something outside of nature, 
but as just such natural events as any other. They 
are links in the chains of reactions produced by an 
organism in an environment, and cannot legitimately 
be isolated from this context. . .. The total re- 
action of the organism of which mental processes 
are parts 1s surely a physiological event.” 

A peculiar effort of the imagination is required be- 
fore this view becomes plausible. An experience 
and an agitation in the body seem so unlike one an- 
other that the suggestion that they are one and the 
same, and that the difference is merely in our mode 
of access to them, is often treated as outrageous. 
Yet it is the very uniqueness of experience which 
suggests this view; and those who dismiss its advo- 
cates as unable to appreciate the obvious fact that 
experience is unique are frequently unaware of the 
weight of considered opinion in favor of the lin- 
guistic solution. We approach all other happenings 
from without; but our experience is a happening in 
ourselves. Thus it should naturally seem to us 
totally distinct from the happenings which we ob- 
serve through signs; and if, as this view holds, an 
experience be observed from without, it must be un- 


* Human Psychology (1919), by Howard C. Warren, p. 415. 
* Psyche, vol. v, 1924-25, pp. 80-81. 


30 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


recognizable as an experience. The unlikeness, 
therefore, would only be an argument against treat- 
ing the experience and the nervous disturbance as 
identical if the psychologist introspecting and the 
neurologist making his conjectures were using the 
same kind of observation. Language itself (always 
awkward when things which have been traditionally 
regarded as different have to be identified) and the 
absence of parallel instances, which could be used 
as analogies, are further difficulties. Thus it is often 
objected that we can ask questions about the brain— 
its shape, for example—which we cannot ask about 
the mind. It is true that such questions at present 
sound awkward; but, to take a rough parallel, we 
do not, if we are wise, conclude that because the re- 
mark, “Parliament is hungry,” sounds awkward, 
Parliament must therefore consist of something other 
than the human beings who forthwith proceed to 
lunch. 

As Professor Dewey well puts it, “our language 
1s So permeated with consequences of theories which 
have divided the body and mind from each other, 
making separate existential realms out of them, that 
we lack words to designate the actual existential 
fact. . . . Body-mind simply designates what ac- 
tually takes place when a living body is implicated in 
situations of discourse, communication, and participa- 
tion.”* It is from a position similar to this that 
many adherents of the theory of ‘emergent evolu- 
tion’ proceed. At various points in the evolutionary 


* Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925), pp. 284-285. 


THE MIND AND THE BODY 31 


process there have arisen, according to this view, 
which is associated with the name of Lloyd Morgan 
and is a development from the earlier vitalistic 
formulation of Bergson, new or emergent ‘factors.’ 
Thus purely physical processes, as they increase in 
complexity, give rise to chemical emergents, and 
similarly the organic emerges from the inorganic. 
In the same way, it is suggested, ‘mind’ (conation) 
emerges out of life, and consciousness out of mind— 
first, most probably, in the form of pain. This is 
in many respects a convenient way of describing 
evolution, if we remember that the new or emer- 
gent factor need be nothing other than a new ar- 
rangement or integration of what was already in 
being; in which case ‘mind’ is not to be contrasted 
with body in the Mind-body controversy, but is a 
shorthand term for a certain mode of working of 
some bodies. Advocates of the vocabulary of ‘emer- 
gence,’ therefore, need not dissent from the Double 
Language explanation, since they are not concerned 
to deny that psychology and some parts of neurology 
are ultimately describing the same processes. 
Advantages of the Linguistic Solution. The Dou- 
ble Language view retains the advantages of the 
physical approach while avoiding its incompleteness; 
for on this view psychology is no more reduced to 
neurology than neurology is reduced to psychology.’ 
* As Professor Eddington puts it in his contribution to Science, Re- 
ligion, and Reality (1925): ‘There is nothing to prevent the as- 
semblage of atoms forming the brain from being a thinking- 


machine. . . . Because we see that our precise knowledge of certain 
aspects of the behavior of atoms leaves their intrinsic nature just 


32 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Both remain indispensable parts of a complete ac- 
count. Introspection, metaphorically speaking, studies 
life from within, neurology from without. Each 
account supplements the other. Thus the natural 
prejudices on both sides have less play, and are less 
offended by this theory than by any of the rival 
views. Those who resent a solution which would 
reduce all mental life to a mere play of brain proc- 
esses, governed by laws into which such things as 
hopes, desires, purposes, and aspirations do not enter, 
can find on careful consideration no ground for ob- 
jection; for neural laws would be a translation of 
just these kinds of things into terms of neural ac- 
tion. At the same time those who feel a despair 
of a science whose methods and results do not ad- 
mit of control and corroboration by the methods 
and results of the other sciences will find their de- 
mand met. 

The Interchange of Methods. Whichever of the 
above views the reader elects to adopt provisionally, 
he will undoubtedly find his interest in psychology 
heightened and sustained by a habit of constantly 
regarding the facts with which he becomes acquainted 
in the light of the bearing they may have upon this 
all-important question. He will find, too, that the 
actual process of psychological investigation involves 
a constant interchange between the two methods, 
study of the body and the nervous system by obser- 
as transcendental and inscrutable as the nature of the mind, so the 


difficulty of the interaction of matter and mind is lessened.”—-Or 
rather, the difficulties raised by the term ‘interaction’ vanish! 


THE MIND AND THE BODY 33 


vation and the technique of the neurologist, and 
study of the mind by what is known as introspection. 
And in actual fact he will constantly be attempting 
to translate the results of the one into the terms of 
the other. If, for example, he has a headache he 
will consider whether lack of exercise, too much food, 
too little sleep, bad air, or some such physiological 
cause is likely to have so affected the brain as to 
cause the headache. That something is wrong he 
knows from within on purely psychological grounds. 
He then tries to arrive by physiological considera- 
tions at a probable explanation of this very state of 
affairs. Or again he may look up from his book 
some evening and be surprised to notice that it 1s 
long past his ordinary bedtime. This unusual be- 
havior he will explain by saying: “I must have been 
unusually interested”—a psychological explanation 
for the prolonged continuance of the movements and 
adaptations of reading. 

Now whether we regard these as instances of inter- 
action between body and mind or as evidence for a 
double aspect or a double language view 1s at present 
unimportant. What is important is to notice how 
intimately observation of bodily behavior, together 
with inferences as to the working of the nervous 
system, are mingled in all our descriptions of the 
events in our lives with observations of our feelings, 
our thoughts, our interests, and the rest of our 
experiences. Our movements, etc., are public facts, 
our experiences are private. A complete account of 
a minute of any person’s life would have to mention 


34 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


both public and private facts. Neither alone would 
be adequate. It is those who are most expert in in- 
ferring the one kind of fact from the other who 
succeed in the world. There is nothing so important 
as to be able to pass without mistake from observa- 
tion of the behavior of other people to conclusions 
about their thoughts, feelings, and intentions; and 
conversely to pass without mistake from our own 
private experiences to conclusions about the external 
events which are influencing us and about the state 
of our bodies. 

Program. This division between observations from 
within and from without, therefore, will guide us 
in the division of our subject-matter. And since the 
stock of common knowledge is far greater as regards 
internal observations than external, we will begin 
by describing in outline the part which is less familiar, 
namely the working of the nervous system so far as 
this concerns psychology: the more familiar part may 
then be considered in a new light. Keeping to the 
standpoint of external observation, we shall sketch 
the growth of the mind from its earliest forms to 
its present development in man. We shall, of course, 
unavoidably be using throughout a great deal of 
information which we only possess thanks to internal 
observation of experiences. This serves as a clue 
to external observation. We know before we begin 
to consider psychology at all a very great deal about 
the experiences which in ourselves correspond to 
certain forms of behavior. We cannot help inter- 
preting certain noises made by a baby as meaning 


THE MIND AND THE BODY 35 


discomfort and certain others as meaning satisfaction. 
It would be folly to attempt to dispense altogether 
with this knowledge. Without such knowledge as 
a clue it is certain that neither neurology nor physi- 
ology would have got far on the road. We must 
be careful, needless to say, to avoid misinterpreta- 
tions, as, for example, in dealing with animals un- 
like man. 

We shall use this clue; and when we have carried 
our neurological account as far as possible, we shall 
turn to the psychological account and describe the 
mind as it appears from within. Knowledge gained 
by either method will be found invaluable in the 
development of the other. 


CHAPTER III: IMPULSE AND INHIBITION 


The Action of Neurones. The body is a vast so- 
ciety of living cells, many hundreds of thousands 
of millions in number; each of these cells has its 
special task, its contribution towards the activity of 
the whole society. Each, of whatever kind it may 
be, in skin or bone or: muscle or gland, depends for 
its life upon the co-operation in numberless ways of 
other kinds of cells. But this co-operation does not 
come about of itself. Special arrangements are 
needed to adjust the different activities of separate 
groups of cells to one another; and, what is equally 
important, to put the organism as a whole into 
adjustment with what is happening outside it. From 
minute to minute the situation in which we find 
ourselves changes; we need to make suitable cor- 
responding changes ourselves. Conversely, our own 
internal state changes and we need to make suitable 
changes in the situation. The principal agent where- 
by this is done is the nervous system. 

The nervous system is itself made up of living 
cells which specialize as conductors, handing on dis- 
turbances which arise in one part of the body so 
that other parts of the body can deal with the situa- 
tion. These cells (known as neurones) are of a 
fantastic variety of forms; some will be found illus- 
trated in Fig. I. But since they are all essentially 
conductors, they have a common plan. Each consists 

36 





Fic. I.—Various Types or NEURONES 


(To illustrate the great variety of forms taken by the cells which make up the 
nervous system) 


I. Nerve cell with beginning of its Axon and Dendrites. 

II. Types of pericellular network around the cell-body of a neurone, 
neared is ways in which one neurone forms synapses or 
connections with another. 

III. Coarse variety of (II). 

IV. a. Neurone of common type with short dendrites and single long 
axon (Golgi cell of first order).—Axon drawn in double line. 

IV. 4. Neurone of another type (Golgi cell of second order). 

V. Synapses or junctions between a neurone (A) and a number of 
other neurones (B); branches of the axon (C) forming basket- 
like endings around their cell-bodies (Purkinje system). 


38 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


of a cell-body, which is as it were the commissariat 
department of the whole cell looking after its nour- 
ishment and upkeep, and also of a varying number of 
prolongations in some cases of great length, as, for 
instance, when a neurone in the spinal cord sends a 
prolongation down to a muscle for the toe or receives 
one from the root of a hair in the back of the hand. 

When a stimulus is applied to one portion of the 
neurone a wave of change spreads through it at con- 
siderable speed (in man as high as 125 meters a 
second). The exact nature of the change is difficult 
to discover, for several reasons. The neurone is 
microscopic; it is made up of the most complex 
substance on this planet; and it has, of course, to be 
kept alive while it is being investigated. But the 
change is certainly in part chemical. Latent energy 
in the cell is released on stimulation; the intensity 
of the agitation set up is not equivalent to that of 
the stimulus which releases it. There is, as it were, 
a leisurely explosion which spreads through the cell. 

The Interaction of Neurones. This wave of change 
is handed on from neurone to neurone. They touch 
one another off as a series of fuses in contact might. 
The points of contact, known as synapses (Gk. syn- 
apto = join together), seem to act as valves: they let 

* Whether contact occurs, and whether there are not narrow thread- 
like structures which bridge the gap and so make the neurones contin- 
uous with one another, is disputed. In any case these meeting points 
are of peculiar importance. They are the points of greatest re- 
sistance in the path of the impulse, like hurdles in the track of a 
runner. For it is a curious fact that, though the impulse may, while 


passing through a synapse or series of synapses, be decreased in 
strength or extinguished, yet, if it passes the difficult piece of the 


IMPULSE AND INHIBITION 39 


the impulse pass in one direction only; it is not 
allowed to return on its track. The neurone itself 
may have something to do with this. Among its 
prolongations (see Fig. I), however numerous, there 
is, as a general rule, one (known as the axon) which 
is different from the others (known as dendrites). 
It is finer and as a rule longer. And it is through 
the axon that the impulse passes on to the next 
neurone in the chain. The dendrites, or the cell- 
body, receive the impulse, either from a sense-organ 
or from the axon of another neurone; the axon con- 
ducts it elsewhere. It follows that if we stimulate 
the wrong end of a chain of neurones nothing hap- 
pens at the other end. 

The neurone is thus rather like a tree whose roots 
receive water and convey it to the stem and branches; 
for the axon commonly branches, and the impulse 
may pass out of it now through this branch, now 
through that, sometimes from one branch, sometimes 
from many. What happens in any particular case 
depends upon the state of the synapses, or upon the 
state of the neurones themselves. As to this, little 
has yet been definitely ascertained. The point to 
track at all, it gets new life and goes on as before. An impulse is 
usually stopped at a synapse. And the synapse as a contact surface be- 
tween cells is a point at which the most varied and the most im- 
portant changes might be expected to take place. As Sir Charles 
Sherrington observes, “it might restrain diffusion, bank up osmotic 
pressure, restrict the movement of ions, accumulate electric charges, 
support a double electric layer, alter in shape and surface tension 
with changes in difference of potential, alter in difference of potential 
with changes in surface tension or shape, or intervene as a mem- 


brane between dilute solutions of electrolytes of different concentra- 
tion or colloidal suspensions with different sign of charge.” 


40 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


notice 1s that there is always a bewildering variety 
of possible paths for the impulse, and which of them 
it takes is the all-important matter, since different 
paths lead to different responses and so to different 
behavior and different experiences. It may be added 
that however incomplete the physiologist’s account of 
what happens at the synapse, the psychologist’s own 
independent account of choice (for this is what is 
often psychologically in question) is just as scrappy 
and unfinished. 

The Conflict of Impulses. The central problem, 
then, is this—How does it happen that an impulse 
takes one path on a given occasion and not another? 
To consider it we need a clear idea of the system 
as a whole (cf. Fig. Il) and of the broad outlines 
of its working. 

In the first place, it is an extraordinarily unified 
system; its various parts and their separate activities 
are interdependent in the highest degree. This must 
obviously be the case in an organ whose job is to 
imtegrate the body, to unite its activities into orderly 
co-operative behavior. But the rule that what is 
happening in any one part of the nervous system 
depends upon what is happening elsewhere holds 
good throughout, and we must strenuously resist the 
temptation to regard any particular impulse as an 
isolated happening. 

If a wasp stings my finger I usually take the finger 
away from it, and it is tempting to analyze this 
impulse as though the rest of the goings-on in my 
nervous system were irrelevant. But if I were hang- 


Gerebrum 






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of Spinal KooE and fibres of 
Sympothetsc. RAS " 


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Fic. I.—Generat DracraM oF THE Nervous SysTEM 
Showing the relationship of the central nervous system to the sympathetic, 


42 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


ing over a precipice by that hand alone I should not 
wave it about, however busy the wasp might be. The 
fact is that even the impulses which seem most in- 
sistent and independent have merely a precedence 
allowed by the others. They take their course by 
consent and in the general interest, and may, if the 
situation is sufficiently exceptional, be overruled. 
Adjustment through Clearing-houses. The instance 
suggests a point of view which is illuminating. The 
arm muscles of the wasp’s victim are engaged for 
the moment in the task of holding on. A special set 
of neurones (motor neurones) running down to them 
from the spinal cord is keeping them in the right 
state of contraction. But the sting of the wasp sets 
up an agitation in another set of neurones (afferent 
or sensory neurones) which run up to the spinal cord, 
and this agitation would, if it did not find them 
already engaged, make use of some of those very 
same motor neurones to throw the muscles into a 
different series of contractions. At the entrance to 
these motor neurones two rival claimants for the use 
of them have arisen. Now the central part of the 
nervous system (the spinal cord, that is to say, and 
the brain) is an arrangement for adjusting prec- 
edences between such claims in view of the whole 
relevant situation. The motor neurone, or the simi- 
lar apparatus in the case of a gland, is therefore 
sometimes called the “final common path.” It is 
an apparatus at the disposal of an immense number 
of impulses from different sources, some of which 
can use it together while others obviously can only 


IMPULSE AND INHIBITION 43 


use it in turn. In between the sources of these im- 
pulses and the motor apparatus intervenes tier after 
tier of clearing-houses sorting out rival claims, com- 
bining some, holding up others. These are arranged 
in tiers because plainly the extent of the relevant 
situation varies from case to case; it may be com- 
paratively narrow and simple, or it may embrace the 
whole nature of the universe as known to the indi- 
vidual. The situation relevant to the way we breathe, 
for example, is fairly simple. The main factors are 
the state of the atmosphere and of the blood and the 
position of the body. So the adjustment of the 
various claims can ordinarily be left to fairly lowly 
centers as a routine business. But for the singer and 
the Everest climber the matter is more complicated; 
higher-level clearing-houses have to take charge, and 
since these higher centers are less used to the busi- 
ness, a learning process is required. 

The Importance of the Head. The highest centers 
are those which have to take note of the widest and 
most intricate situations and to order the largest and 
most varied sets of claims. For reasons which are 
clear enough in outline they le in the head—in the 
‘cerebrum’ and ‘cerebellum.’* To quote the physi- 
ologist: 

“The head is in many ways the individual’s greater 
part. It is the more so the higher the individual 
stands in the animal scale. It has the mouth, it 

* The cerebrum (see Fig. II) is the seat of the highest co-ordina- 


tions of sense and movement, whereas the cerebellum is concerned with 
the highest co-ordinations of the relations of the organism to space. 


44 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


takes in the food, including water and air, it has the 
main receptive organs providing data for the rapid 
and accurate adjustment of the animal to time and 
space. To it the trunk, an elongated motor organ 
with a share of the digestive surface, and the skin, 
is appended as an apparatus of locomotion and nutri- 
tion. The latter must of necessity lie at the command 
of the greater receptor organs of the head.” * 

The nose for lower animals, such as the dog, the 
eyes and ears for man, are the sources of most of the 
claims which are going to be made upon the motor 
neurones that finally promote action. And the 
dominance of the brain, the organ for co-ordinating 
the impulses set going through these sense organs 
with the rest of the impulses ceaselessly flowing 
through the nervous system, is explained by this 
fact. What may be regarded as the conjunction of 
brain and spinal cord, the medulla, is itself the seat 
not only of very important nerve-centers, but also of 
the centers for breathing, vomiting, and of the vagus 
nerve, which is intimately related to the sympa- 
thetic nervous system dealt with in Chapter XIV. 

The exact topographical site of the various orders 
of clearing-houses which occur in the brain (as to 
which a good deal is beginning to be known) is of no 
general importance for psychology. An idea of 
some of the areas which are known to be concerned 
with special functions can be gathered from Fig. III. 
It is the scheme of their relations to one another 


“Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System 
(1914), p. 350. 


IMPULSE AND INHIBITION 45 


that matters. Each clearing-house is a fairly ex- 
tensive region where innumerable cell-bodies with 
their dendrites and axons, interlacing and criss-cross- 
ing in every direction in a tangle of incredible com- 


Ankle nee 


Fi 







ssure o f Rolando 


fAv0ITOQN 
patie ECy 


Sues 


Fic. I1].—Tue Locarization or Function 1n BRAIN 
(Seen from the left side) 


The area thickly spotted with names just in front of the Rolandic 
fissure is the mofor area, and if it is electrically stimulated voluntary 
movements of the parts indicated occur. The corresponding areas on 
the other side of the fissure are reception centers for touch sensations 
from the same parts. The visual reception area is at the extreme back 
of the brain. Between this and the tongue area lie, with innumerable 
others, the association centers for reading, 





fissure of Syhvias 


plexity, are massed together. Cell-bodies and den- 
drites are gray, axons are white in appearance; hence 
the name ‘gray cells’ or ‘gray matter’ for those parts 
of the brain in which the most complex transactions 
take place. The white matter consists of axons run- 
ning, as a rule, lengthy courses and linking up more 


46 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


distant regions. Every part of the brain is so 
linked with every other part. It is rather fortunate 
that a very extensive region of gray matter (known 
as the cortex) stretches over the surface of the brain 
like the peel of an orange, just where it is most easily 
got at for investigation. There are other more deep- 
lying regions, however, about the precise functions 
of which much less is known. 

Thanks to this intermingling of neurones in these 
centers any impulse reaching them has an almost 
infinite number of possible routes by which it can 
pass out. It can be subdivided into many paths, or 
many impulses can be combined into a common path. 
At the same time there is the greatest possible oppor- 
tunity for different impulses to influence one 
another, by blocking or clearing possible paths for 
one another, by forming alliances, by mutual rein- 
forcements, and various forms of interference and 
conflict. 

The Spinal Cord. The exact way in which neurones 
interact is still largely a matter of speculation. What 
little we know of them comes chiefly from experi- 
ments upon what are known as ‘spinal’ reflexes. 
When the spinal cord is severed from the brain, its 
operations are no longer controlled by the higher 
clearing-houses, and a great simplification results; 
further, as there is clear evidence to show, conscious- 
ness, including pain, for the parts thus cut off, no 
longer occurs. It is then possible to elicit move- 
ments, say of the leg, by simple stimuli in a very 
uniform manner. By combining stimuli and noting 


IMPULSE AND INHIBITION 47 


the responses, something of the ways in which im- 
pulses combine or interfere with one another can be 
made out. For instance, as most children know, 
there is a scratch-reflex which can be elicited in a 
sleeping dog by gently pulling the hair or tickling 
the skin of his flank near the shoulder. Now there 
is a curious point which even experiments on the 
hearth-rug will bring out. The scratch has a rhythm 
of its own. It varies in vigor and in the amplitude 
of its sweep, but remains almost exactly the same in 
rate, however we space our ticklings; whether we 
scratch the dog slowly or rapidly, he scratches him- 
self at a uniform rate. The responses are spaced 
out as compared with the stimuli by a central arrange- 
ment which completely transforms the rhythm of 
the impulses. The reason is evident; if it were not 
so, the leg might merely reach the point to be 
scratched and stay there. It must have time to return 
to the starting point. 

Inhibition. But this return is really a complicated 
affair. The leg is moved by two sets of muscles 
opposite to each other. One set bends it, the other 
stretches it. When the leg is at rest both these sets 
are mildly active; each has a slight contraction which 
is known as the muscular tonus, and this is, in part at 
least, maintained through a series of impulses con- 
tinually passing out through the motor neurones. 
When the leg is bent one set of muscles (the flexors) 
contracts more vigorously; the opposite set (the ex- 
tensors) relaxes. So in every movement the motor 
neurones concerned have to see that one set of 


48 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


muscles contracts and the opposite set relaxes. In 
other words, introducing an important technical term 
for an idea which is fundamental in psychology, one 
set of muscles is excited and the other set is inhibited 
(Lat. izhibeo=check). Actually, the problem is less 
simple, for it has recently been claimed that volun- 
tary muscles are innervated from the sympathetic 
nervous system (with which we deal in Chapter 
XIV) as well as by the cerebro-spinal. 

It is tempting to suppose that there must be a 
special set of motor neurones or a special kind of 
impulse whose office is solely to inhibit. But the 
very same motor neurones are used sometimes to 
excite a muscle and sometimes to inhibit it. Inhibi- 
tion is a shutting off of excitation from the motor 
neurones, not a special form of message which 
immobilizes the muscle. Excitation is a passing 
through, inhibition a cutting off, of impulses. As 
the dog scratches away, at every stroke spinal im- 
pulses are being turned on for the flexor muscles and 
off for the extensors and vice versa as the leg sweeps 
back. What, in terms of inter-neurone action in the 
spinal cord, is happening? 

To study this two reflexes are taken ,which are 
antagonistic—that is to say, such that each tends to 
inhibit the other. For example, if we stimulate the 
sleeping dog’s other hind foot while a hearty scratch 
is in progress, we shall probably wake him up, but 
under suitable conditions this stimulation simply puts 
an end to the scratch; the leg is thrust out instead. 


IMPULSE AND INHIBITION 49 


This ‘crossed extension-reflex’ inhibits * the scratch- 
reflex, and does so, just as in the case of the unlucky 
tourist and the wasp, by making a rival demand for 
the use of the final common path, the motor neu- 
rones that excite the leg muscles. 

A diagram will assist matters at this point. Mand 
M’ are motor neurones or sets of them going to the 
flexor and extensor muscles of the leg. A and B are 
neurones through which impulses come in from the 
two sense-organs stimulated. A by itself would 
excite MZ and inhibit M’, B by itself would excite /’ 
and inhibit 4. Remembering that ‘inhibit’? means 


A 


5 





Fic. IV 


merely ‘leave quite unexcited,’ what kind of an 
account can be suggested of how it is that whenever 
M is excited M’ is inhibited, and vice versa? 

Here we pass from the realm of fact to that of 
conjecture. But the part played by inhibition 
throughout the working of the nervous system is so 
extensive, and its importance for psychology is so 

* This correspondence of excitation with inhibition for antagonistic 
muscles has been verified for inhibitions lasting no more than .004 
of asecond. The delicacy and refinement of the experimental work 
which has been done on this and allied problems is almost beyond 
belief. A good idea of some of the methods can be gathered from 


Sherrington’s The Integrative Action of the Nervous System and 
from Keith Lucas’ The Conduction of the Nervous Impulse. 


50 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


great, that any approach towards an understanding 
of it is of value. What follows may, at first sight, 
appear alarming to the beginner; but is not really 
more difficult than a simple Cross-Word Puzzle. 
The reader may, however, with a good conscience, 
proceed rapidly to Chapter V, and return to this 
slightly more intricate section when its importance 
has become clear to him. 

Four Theories of Inhibition. Four theories may be 
said to be in the running. One is that the impulse, 
or rather volley of impulses coming in through A 
liberates at some point on its path a substance which 
blocks all the other paths to the motor center, thus 
cutting out M4’ while going through itself to M. 
The substance would have to be very evanescent in 
its effect, but that is not impossible. The objection is 
that the suggestion is too vague to be very useful at 
present. 

Another theory is that the impulse on its way to 
M drains away energy from the neurones leading 
to M’ by lowering the resistance of synapses which 
lead out of B into A, thus cutting off M’. The as- 
sumption is that the passage of an impulse through a 
system of neurones lowers the resistance of the 
synapses leading into it. If we think of the neu- 
rones as connected pipes it is clear that lowering the 
pressure in A-M would cause water in B-M’ to flow 
into it. This theory agrees with many facts which 
are otherwise hard to understand. Fatigue of the 
synapses would lead to the drainage-process being 
periodically reversed if the stimuli remain the same, 


IMPULSE AND INHIBITION $1 


thus giving a neat explanation of ‘alternating’ move- 
ments like the scratch-reflex. But some obvious dif- 
ficulties arise. One of these concerns what is psycho- 
logically the most interesting consequence of the 
theory. Inhibition is represented as a kind of theft 
of energy. A, when it inhibits M’, which would 
otherwise be excited by B, steals some of B’s energy. 
The more intense the excitation in B, provided it be 
not greater than that in A, the more energy A steals. 
But this result seems not to be experimentally veri- 
fiable. Another consequence would be that if, for 
example, I am writing, the louder a barrel organ 
plays beneath my window, provided that I do not 
attend to it, the better my work will go on. This 
again seems doubtful. But the most serious objec- 
tion is that when an axon branches, there is no reason 
to suppose that conduction out of one branch affects 
what happens in the other branches. Thus the 
‘drainage’ analogy seems hardly to work if examined 
closely. In view of the constant appeal by the theo- 
rists of psycho-analysis to overflow metaphors—as, 
e.g., when the libido is said to be dammed up—this 
conclusion is of great importance. 

A third, more recent, theory starts from the ascer- 
tained fact that the passage of an impulse leaves its 
track in a ‘refractory state.’ That is to say for a 
brief period no other impulse can follow. Now, it is 
supposed that the B— impulses (impulses from B) 
which inhibit M/Z have to pass over part of the same 
track as A— impulses which would excite it, and 
that the going in the shaded parts is so bad that B— 


§2 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


impulses give up just before reaching M, and yet 
leave refractory states on A’s path. Thus no B— 
impulses reach M to excite it and yet when B— 
impulses are not running A — impulses get through, 
since they are able to survive their shorter distance 
of bad going. Meanwhile whenever B— impulses 
block the path to M, M’ gets excited, which was the 
principal fact to be explained. This beautifully 
ingenious theory (which is largely the work of Dr. 
E.. D. Adrian) is likely to be developed further. 

The fourth and most recent theory, due to 
Lapicque, is as speculative as the others, but it has 
the advantages that it is closer to the probable facts 
than the second, and is more helpful in imagining 
the subtler happenings in the nervous system than 
the third. It starts from comparing the times re- 
quired to produce a response in different nerves and 
their muscles. The way in which it has been worked 
out is as follows: 

Chronaxies. There is for each muscle and nerve a 
certain intensity of electrical stimulation which is the 
least that will excite a response, however long we 
give it. If this intensity is doubled and the times 
these doubled intensities take to excite the nerve or 
the muscle are measured, it is found that these times 
(known as ‘chronaxies’ ee chronos = ‘time’ and 
axta=‘value’) have simple relations to one another. 
Every tissue has, as it were, its own private 
time-value. 

For example, a muscle and its motor nerve have 
the same chronaxy; they are isochronous, but dif- 


IMPULSE AND INHIBITION a 


ferent muscles have different chronaxies. Neurones, 
too, have each their own chronaxy. When the 
chronaxies of neurones which work together are not 
the same, one is an integral number of times longer 
than the other—three times for instance. Now— 
and this is the interesting point—it is found that 
conduction only takes place when this normal re- 
lation between chronaxies holds. By poisoning a 
nerve, with strychnine or curare, for example, we can 
alter its chronaxy and then the excitation no longer 
passes to the muscle. It is the difference between 
their chronaxies which matters. If we lengthen or 
shorten both the chronaxies together, the conduction 
still goes on; it is only when we alter one without 
altering the other that it ceases. And similarly with 
the neurones. They get out of tune, as it were. The 
expression is not strictly correct since a change in 
chronaxy 1s very different from a change in a rate 
of vibration, but we shall use it for lack of a better 
and say two neurones are im tune when their chron- 
axies allow the impulse to pass, and out of tune when 
they don’t. 

Inhibition then might consist in a change of 
chronaxy throwing an afferent neurone and a motor 
neurone, for example, out of tune with each other. 
This would be a delightfully simple solution of the 
problem. And fortunately there seems good reason 
to accept it, for it has been shown that changes in 
chronaxy can be produced not only by poisons, by 
fatigue, and by hormones such as adrenalin (See 
Chapter XIV), but by neural influences themselves. 


54 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Cutting off the action of the brain commonly doubles 
the chronaxies in the spinal chord. Now this seems 
to imply that neurones, besides handing on impulses, 
have a further, quite distinct, way of influencing one 
another. 

If this is confirmed it opens a completely new 
prospect of explaining thought in terms of the brain. 

In much of what follows we shall assume the 
chronaxy theory or something like it to be true, and 
shall call the passage of trains of discharges ‘im- 
pulses’ and modifications of’ chronaxies ‘influences.’ 
A neurone can be discharged by other neurones and 
it can be influenced, tuned up or tuned down, by 
them. This last and especially the possibility of its 
being tuned back again to its former chronaxy is all 
important, as we shall see later. One further point 
should be noticed. A given difference from the 
normal tuning may stop a moderately strong impulse 
from passing, but a stronger will get by. Thus the 
normal channel for an impulse may be overflowed 
if the excitation is violent. This helps to explain 
why different intensities of stimulation may have 
such different effects; and, we may add, it is of great 
significance in connection with emotion. 

Various other, even more intricate, theories of in- 
hibition have also been put forward, and it is certain 
that whatever account is ultimately accepted will 
have to be very complicated indeed. 

One other feature, which no theory yet satisfac- 
torily explains, is probably of some considerable 
psychological importance. This is the ‘rebound,’ 


IMPULSE AND INHIBITION 55 


following inhibition, which is often experimentally 
discoverable. The inhibited activity starts again with 
renewed vigor when the inhibition is removed. 
Whether this is always the case it is at present im- 
possible to know, but there are many obvious facts 
in everybody’s experience which suggest that it may 
be very general; the increased vigor of a ‘tempta- 
tion,” for example, which is only momentarily 
quashed, and many of the phenomena unearthed by 
psycho-analysis. 


CHAPTER IV: HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 


The Relation of Higher and Lower Levels. We can 
turn back now to consider how the various higher- 
and lower-level clearing-houses in the nervous sys- 
tem are related. And we must be careful not to 
choose a point of view which presents the matter 
upside down, so to speak. Since the arrangements 
in the spinal cord are more easily investigated than 
the higher centers in the brain, it is easy to fall into 
the habit of thinking of them first and regarding the 
brain as something which they call into action only if 
they cannot get on without it. But if we want to 
understand a business it is better to begin by talking 
to the directors than by plaguing the office boy and 
the stenographers. We may otherwise tend to see 
the superior authorities merely as conveniences which 
the lower ranks call in only when they need them. 
But in fact it is the other way round. 

Instead, then, of starting with one particular 
stimulus and asking how it comes to arouse a par- 
ticular response, we must begin, as psychologists, 
with the total situation in which the body finds itself. 
Of the innumerable impulses which are coming in 
from the greater number of our sense organs all the 
while, only a small proportion ultimately reach the 
final common paths, the motor neurones which excite 
the muscles. But very many which themselves play 
no final part have yet, at one level or another, a sav 

56 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 57 


in what finally shall take place; typically by barring 
out other impulses which otherwise would get 
through. And only a small proportion of these 
finally give rise to consciousness in the form of medi- 
ating the individual’s awareness of some part of the 
situation. A process of selection takes place quite 
early on in the afferent (incoming) course of the 
impulse. Further, a set of excitations which in them- 
selves would each be unnoticed and have no central 
effects may, if they happen to come together in a 
certain pattern, get through and take effect at once; 
for example, a set of black and yellow streaks in the 
landscape when, and only when, coiled upon one 
another in the rattlesnake fashion, or a set of sounds 
in an otherwise unnoticed hubbub if they happen to 
be arranged in the pattern of our own name. 
Receptive Centers. Thus the notion of receptive 
centers which act as a kind of selective sieve becomes 
necessary; and the actual location of some of these 
centers in the cerebral cortex has been discovered. 
Here a preliminary sorting out occurs. For example, 
other things being equal, a stimulus which is unlike 
its neighbors has a better chance of getting through, 
and certain kinds of impulses have almost invariable 
precedence. Again, impulses arising from stimuli 
harmful to the skin override all others. But hard 
upon this simpler kind of sorting out there follows 
a more complicated task—that of responding to 
certain patterns, as with the snake or the name, and 
not to others. The reception apparatus recognizes 
some patterns just as a lock ‘recognizes’ its key. It 


$8 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


is not difficult to imagine this being done by a system 
of neurones which discharge other systems only when 
excited together or in a certain order. But the fact 
that we ‘recognize’ our names when spoken by very 
different voices raises a great difficulty which we 
shall note again in our chapter on Perception. 

Co-ordination Centers, The receptive centers are in 
close connection then with sensory co-ordination 
centers, as these arrangements which pick out pat- 
terns among incoming impulses are called. Certain 
injuries, it is found, may incapacitate the co-ordina- 
tion centers without disturbing the receptive centers. 
In such a case there might be nothing detectably 
wrong with the patient’s vision, for example, in 
itself; he would not be blind, he would merely not 
recognize anything he saw. 

But the different co-ordination centers are them- 
selves in close touch with one another, as we see if 
we shut our eyes and attempt to recognize an un- 
familiar object first by touch and handling alone, and 
then with our eyes open. The particular patterns 
which one center will pick out depend upon the 
patterns which other centers are picking out or have 
just picked out. How is this interdependence 
brought about? 

Association Areas. There is here probably the same 
kind of rivalry for a common path (not in this case, 
of course, a final common path) that we encountered 
in the case of the motor neurones of the spinal cord. 
The various receptive areas in the brain are known 
to be linked together by tracts of nerve fibers in a 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 59 


very intimate manner; impulses leaving each are 
continually passing onwards a further stage towards 
their goal, the motor neurones. But they have a 
long way to go, many alliances to make and many 
competitors to deal with. Thus on the inner side of 
the sensory co-ordination centers there will be many 
further centers which carry out the same kind of 
transactions as the co-ordination centers; only this 
time with the products of the co-ordination centers 
and not with original impulses from the sense organs. 
We may call these higher clearing-houses the associa- 
tion areas. 

Now imagine a co-ordination center which has re- 
ceived from the receptive centers let us say 7,003 
impulses which together make up a certain pattern, 
and suppose that it hands on a much simplified pat- 
tern of 42 impulses as the result of the combined 
action of these 7,003. This 42 pattern is a candi- 
date for passage through an association center. But 
at the entrance it has to pass through a set of neu- 
rones which are also being used by other patterns 
-coming from other co-ordination centers. Suppose 
that it conflicts with them, that it cannot make an 
alliance and reinforce them, but is in some way in- 
compatible. The situation will be similar to that 
which we have already considered in the case of the 
spinal reflexes. What will happen? 

Evidently there is a bewildering number of pos- 
sibilities. There may be other association centers into 
which it can discharge, so getting round the difficulty 
for the moment. But then the problem is shifted 


60 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


on to a yet higher association center in which the 
claims of the lower centers are adjusted. It may 
be that part of the pattern can get through and part 
not. It may be that it will as a whole supersede the 
other patterns and bar them out, or it may be barred 
out itself. In the last case the barring out may be 
permanent or temporary, and this will depend upon 
the degree of insistence of the pattern, a matter which 
we have yet to consider. 

The most illuminating case, however, is that in 
which it is possible for the co-ordination center to 
pick out from its 7,003 impulses and send forward a 
different pattern which cam combine with the others 
and get through the association center. Endless 
instances from perception suggest that this is what 
ordinarily happens. Whenever we first suppose our- 
selves to be perceiving one thing and then, since other 
sensory evidence makes this impossible, detect that 
we were mistaken, we have sucha case. The interest- 
ing point is that then the thing, whatever it is, com- 
monly looks quite different from what we supposed 
it to be. In such cases the co-ordination centers 
seem plainly to try again under a subsequent influ- 
ence from the association centers. We need not 
suppose, however, that this subsequent influence 
actually goes through the same neurones which 
brought in the rejected pattern. 

Expectation. So far we have been tracing the 
march of the armies of impulses inwards, but by the 
time the association centers are in play there must 
be corresponding movements outwards, from higher 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 61 


centers to lower, from association centers to sensory 
co-ordination centers. The influence of expectation 
on perception is clear evidence for this. If we are 
expecting a certain person to appear in the distance 
we are extremely likely to mistake other people for 
her. Now an expectation in such a case involves a 
special setting of a co-ordination center brought 
about by an association center, a certain preparedness 
to pick out one pattern rather than others. What 
we know from within as ‘attention’ is accompanied 
by a heightening of tone. An impulse or influence 
from above alters the lock—to use our former met- 
aphor—so that the 7,003 impulses coming in from 
the receptive center may more easily turn it. 

We must think, then, of these tides of impulses 
as having eddies, through which what has already 
reached the centers controls what is still coming in. 
There will be circuits of this kind not only from 
association centers to co-ordination centers but from 
higher to lower association centers. A typical case 
is the influence exercised by a general conception 
(which is the activity of an association center of 
relatively high level) upon the particular instances 
of experience which can be brought under it. When 
we know that a thunderstorm is an electrical phe- 
nomenon, it is no longer quite so easy to regard 
it as a judgment upon our actions. Even the most 
intricate intellectual play of ideas—the mastering of 
a psychological theory, for example—may be im- 
agined as consisting of the same kind of transactions 
as those of the co-ordination centers and the reflex 


62 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


centers of the spinal cord, but carried out at higher 
levels and perhaps of even greater complexity. 

The Influence of the Past. In one respect which 
has not yet been mentioned the complexity is 
certainly greater. The higher we go in the nervous 
system the more definite and the more subtle the in- 
fluence of the past becomes. The spinal dog shows 
no signs of personal memory. Its reactions are fixed. 
It can be taught nothing. But in the intact dog, 
more in the ape, and still more in man, reactions are 
not fixed. What happened in even the remote past 
of the individual’s history has its bearing upon what 
happens now. 

What exactly memory may be in terms of the 
nervous system is a problem which is still a very 
long way from solution. It is better perhaps to 
speak of retention than memory, for memory may 
mean either recollection (I have a memory of 
Armistice Day) or that I now can do something 
(e.g., swim) which I could not do if I had not done 
it before. The second is the sense in which retention 
is used. The first (recollection) is a special instance 
of the working of retention. Both offer many 
problems some of which we must now briefly con- 
sider. 

Retention is already active at the level of the 
sensory co-ordination centers; it is essentially a mat- 
ter of the repetition of certain co-ordinations even 
when the circumstances are no longer the same. It 
shows itself in two ways at every stage of co-ordina- 
tion right up to the highest levels. 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 63 


Retention and the Conditioned Reflex. The response 
on repetition may become quicker, smoother, more 
perfect of its kind, as we see happening in the 
formation of Aabits; or it may dispense with some 
part of the stimulation which was originally neces- 
sary, as we see most clearly in the formation of 
what are known as conditioned reflexes. Usually 
the two effects of retentiveness go together. 

When two impulses have co-operated to produce 
a certain response it is found that after a sufficient 
number of repetitions one of them alone may bring 
it about, though formerly inadequate by itself. 
Such a response is said to be ‘conditioned’; a new 
stimulus has been substituted for the old, and the 
response now occurs under new conditions. In man 
very few repetitions may be sufficient; but after in- 
fancy all his reactions are made to such complicated 
situations that it is far easier to study conditioned 
responses in animals. Even here, however, the 
most elaborate precautions are required to exclude 
disturbing factors. 

The fundamental work on this subject has been 
done by Pavlov and his assistants at Leningrad, and 
the results already attained seem likely to be of the 
utmost assistance to psychology. They are the 
foundation of the theories of the Behaviorist School 
to which we devote a special chapter. Pavlov has 
found it best to work with one particular re- 
sponse. A dog secretes saliva when given food. It 
is his first step towards digesting it. Now all through 
the evolution of the dog (the same is true of man) 


64 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


he has been constantly on the lookout for signs of 
food. He is thus specially prepared for all kinds 
of different stimuli to become connected in his as- 
sociation centers with the presence of food. This 
gives the investigator his opportunity. Every time 





PC 200000"= se-- € 


Fic. V.—Pav.ov’s Doc 


Revolving drum for recording rate of secretion of saliva 
Vessel for receiving salivary secretion 

Observation window or periscope for observing the dog 

. Graduated scale for measuring quantity of salivary secretion 
Electric contacts for setting into operation source of stimulus 


MOO > 


food is put before the dog a particular note, for ex- 
ample, is sounded. After a certain number of repe- 
titions of this combination the note is sounded alone. 
The dog’s mouth waters. A conditioned reflex has 
been established. It may be added that the dog 


does not seem to be averse from this experiment, 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 65 


and jumps of his own accord on to the table where 
he appears in Fig. V. 

By this method many very remarkable phe- 
nomena have been ‘brought to light. For example, 
at first the conditioned stimulus (the note in the case 
we have taken) irradiates. By this it 1s meant that 
any similar stimulus produces some degree of saliva- 
tion. But as the conditioned reflex becomes more 
and more established this irradiation is narrowed 
down until only notes very similar indeed to the 
conditioned note share its power of evoking the re- 
flex. If such a note is now sounded repeatedly with- 
out the unconditioned stimulus (the food) it soon 
becomes ‘inactive’; it loses this power. It has been 
shown that this loss is not a mere disuse, but an 
actual inhibition. The ‘inactive? stimulus inhibits 
salivation. One fact which shows this clearly is very 
striking for further reasons. Suppose that just be- 
fore or during the elicitation of a conditioned re- 
flex we give the dog a strong extra stimulus which 
has not been conditioned in any way, the conditioned 
reflex is at once greatly reduced. This new external 
inhibiting activity superimposes itself on whatever 
process it encounters. If it meets with excitation it 
inhibits it; but, and here is the surprising fact, if 
it meets with inhibition it ihibits this imhibition. 
Thus an electric shock just before the sounding of 
a note which has been made ‘inactive’? causes this 
note to be no longer inhibitory and salivation re- 
appears. 

By progressively making notes nearer and nearer 


66 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


to the conditioned note ‘inactive’ it is possible to in- 
vestigate the dog’s powers of discrimination. With 
pure tones it is found to be vastly superior to that of 
the best human musicians. A point of interest to edu- 
cators arises with what is known as conditioned inhi- 
bition. In this case the conditioned stimulus is ac- 
companied by some slight indifferent stimulus—not, 
as in the last case, by a strong stimulus which itself 
causes an unconditioned reflex. After a number of 
repetitions the extra stimulus causes inhibition, and 
this increases; in the former case the inhibition 
grows weaker. It is found that well-established 
discriminations are temporarily interfered with dur- 
ing the development of such conditioned inhibitions 
even when they concern quite different kinds of 
stimuli. But as soon as the new acquisition is firmly 
established, the interference ceases and the discrim- 
ination returns to its former state.! This phenom- 
enon is met with constantly in education. As Anrep 
remarks, a child who, having mastered addition, is 
taught multiplication, will for a while make mis- 
takes in addition. A dog which had failed to develop 
a discrimination did so almost at once after an easier 
conditioned inhibition had been acquired. The moral 
is perhaps that a child who fails at a problem will 
have a much better chance of solving it after a suc- 
cessful spell at an easier task. 

Finally the extraordinary facts of experimental 
neurasthenia in dogs should be mentioned. If the 
dog is persistently given too difficult a task, for ex- 


*G. V. Anrep, Proc. Royal Soc., Series B, vol. iv, pp. 404 ff. 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 67 


ample if he is forced to attempt a discrimination be- 
tween shapes which are too similar for him, he little 
by little loses all his previously acquired conditioned 
reflexes. He even fails in the end to discriminate 
between what is edible and what is not. At the 
same time he becomes quarrelsome, dirty, and un- 
manageable, howls at the moon and finally ends up 
in a state of general incompetence. A prolonged 
rest cure at the farm is needed to restore him to his 
former good-tempered sanity. The general bear- 
ing of these results, when they are explained, upon 
human psychology is likely to be immense. But 
we must return to the problem presented by the 
simplest case of conditioning. 

The point to note is that here we have a response, 
the watering of the dog’s mouth, which would not 
have occurred if the conditioned stimulus (the note) 
and the unconditioned stimulus (the food) had not 
been combined in the comparatively remote past. 
The past conjunction has left some effect in the 
dog’s nervous system through which the note alone 
produces the response which formerly required the 
presence of the food. How are we to conceive this 
effect? 

The Image Theory. It is important mot to think 
of it either as the storing in some neural archive of 
an image of food which bobs up to co-operate when 
the note is sounded, or as a mere track gouged out, 
or a channel in the neural pathways deepened or en- 
larged. Both theories have tempted many psychol- 
ogists and both are unsatisfactory. The objections 


68 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


to the image theory are simple. There may be 
an image formed; but if so (and the point is very 
difficult to settle) it would be something itself need- 
ing explanation and could not be used as an expla- 
nation. And, further, images are voz stored up; they 
are not persistent effects. They depend upon per- 
sistent effects, but the old theory that they them- 
selves reside permanently in cells in the brain is long 
ago exploded. An image is a process, a transaction, 
just as much asa perception; it isa happening. And 
there is every reason to suppose that images differ 
only from the actual experiences by being aroused 
not through incoming impulses from the receptive 
centers but through impulses of central origin. We 
call them images because they correspond ‘to percep- 
tions, and they are due in some way to persistent 
effects * left behind by perceptions, but they are not, 
themselves, those effects. What lasts is not the 
image, but as Hering said, “the peculiar attunement 
(Stimmung) of the nervous substance in virtue of 
which it will give out to-day the same note that it 
gave out yesterday, if the strings be touched aright.” 
The problem of the image is in part the same 
problem as that of the conditioned reflex itself. 
Namely, what is the nature of the residual effect? 

* These have been called by Semon (Mnemic Psychology, Chapter 
VII) “engrams” and by Morton Prince (The Unconscious, p. 131) 
“neurograms,” but the more usual term in psychology is ‘disposition? 
or ‘trace’ (Stout, Manual of Psychology, p. 18 ff.). It is better to 
think of them not as imprints left behind by excitations, but as 
patterns or configurations to which the centers concerned return when 


the relevant conditions recur. The laying down of a trace is really 
a change in these relevant conditions. 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 69 


But the conditioned reflex is more easy to investigate, 
and should be considered first. 

The Theory of Lowered Resistance. The other ex- 
planation in terms of a deepening of nervous chan- 
nels is much more on the right lines. But it is plainly 
not enough to suppose merely that the repeated 
passage of an impulse lowers the resistance of the 
synapses; and for the following reason. In come 
the two impulses, due to the note and to the food, 
close together. The note must be sounded before 
or contemporaneously with the giving of the food; 
otherwise the conditioned reflex is not established. 
No conditioning at all takes place, surprisingly 
enough, if the note be sounded after the food is 
given. After a number of these combined arrivals 
the note-impulse arrives alone and now goes through 
in the absence of its formerly indispensable colleague. 
It plainly will not do to say merely that the final 
common path (its entrance resistances having been 
lowered) has now got used to this particular intruder. 
If henceforth it always got through, that might be a 
possible account. But, in fact, if we go on sounding 
the note without the food, the salivation instead of 
becoming more and more copious, soon ceases al- 
together. The mere passage of the impulse does 
not of itself keep the resistance down; actual con- 
junction from time to time with the other impulse, 
from the food, is necessary. 

But, it may be suggested, is it not sufficient to say 
that the two together lower the resistance to the one 
alone for a certain while? If I have no money and 


70 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


a friend goes with me occasionally to the opera and 
every time buys me a seat for the rest of the week, 
do we not have a situation somewhat like the condi- 
tioned reflex? If I begin by going alone my appeals 
have no effect on the box office; I do not get through. 
With my friend I do get through, and I get through 
afterwards for a limited while only, unless he comes 
again—when my privilege gets a new lease of life. 
The objection to this analogy as throwing any light 
upon the conditioned reflex is, however, that the pro- 
ceedings in the box office are themselves also con- 
ditioned reflexes on a more elaborate scale, and just 
as much in need of explanation as the watering of the 
dog’s mouth. It may be remarked that circular 
arguments and analogies of this kind are extremely 
hard to avoid in psychology. All the comparisons 
which are so popular between the nervous and the 
telephone systems are guilty of it in more or less 
serious degree. 

McDougall’s Drainage Theory. We are forced then 
to attempt more ingenious explanations. The most 
plausible extension of the ‘lowered resistance? theory 
is McDougall’s drainage hypothesis. We have al- 
ready mentioned reasons for thinking that drainage 
theories will not work. None the less, in this case 
it is worth trying to work out such a theory because 
its failure helps us to see more exactly what it is that 
a better theory must do. For the conditioned reflex 
it might run roughly as follows:—The note when 
first heard by the dog causes a widely radiating im- 
pulse. It is followed immediately by the impulse 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 71 


set up by the food. We must suppose a number of 
side-channels connecting the path of the note-impulse 
with that of the food-impulse. Now the discharge 
of the food-impulse lowers the nervous potential 
in the path (through to the salivary glands) which 
it is taking. It creates a partial vacuum so to speak 
in this path. The note-impulses therefore rush in 
through the side-channels to fill up this vacuum, 
and this rush, whenever it happens, lowers the re- 
sistance in these channels. Now what has to be 
explained is how this rush still takes place, although 
no food-impulse is lowering the potential in the 
food-impulse path. We must obviously suppose that 
it is being lowered in some other way, by impulses 
from the viscera for example. The dog, in other 
words, is to some extent hungry. These impulses 
do not discharge into the final common path and 
make the dog’s mouth water, but they may well be 
supposed to play a part in lowering the potential in 
that path, by draining it slightly themselves, for 
example. A diagram (Fig. VI) may help to make 
the matter clearer. 

The discharge of the food-impulse down the 
middle is supposed to lower the pressure in the 
middle channel F, so draining its neighbors through 
aand a@*, inlet valves from N and H, synapses whose 
resistance becomes lowered with the passage of im- 
pulses. When no food-impulse is passing, impulses 
flowing down H from the visceral sense organs lower 
the pressure there and so drain F slightly through 4 
(an inlet valve from F). Thus when pressure is 


72 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


raised in N through the note being sounded, the im- 
pulse flows into F and out to the salivation center S. 

But we have still to grapple with the principal 
difficulty. Why does the flow from N to F cease to 
happen if the note is repeated too often and no food 
is given with it to the dog? What happens, then, 
to cut off the impulse from N to F? On this kind 
of theory it is clear either that the resistance at 4 





N H 
NOTE RUNGER 
ht de ate {MPULSES 
' “G 
Salivating 
Certre 
Fic. VI 


must have gone up, or that too much of the energy 
in F has been drained elsewhere, through H, say, 
thus inhibiting FP. 

This second possibility seems to be the one worth 
considering. For no plausible account can be given 
as to why, if the mere passage of impulses from N 
to F lowers a’s resistance, further passages should 
raise it again. Fatigue cannot be the cause, since the 
effect is the same no matter how the impulses are 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 73 


spaced out. But there does seem reason to think 
that the discharge of saliva without food may have 
as an indirect consequence the inhibition of the 
process which leads to this unsatisfactory state of 
affairs. For, as we have said, this watering of the 
mouth is a first step in the whole complex cycle of 
digestion. Further steps require the presence of 
something to be digested. Since this is lacking, these 
steps fail, and their failure may well have a back- 
wash effect by increasing drainage from F' for ex- 
ample, of the kind required. 

It will be plain that by this means we have only 
pushed the difficulty further on. We have still to 
work out a mechanism for this new transaction, and 
it seems as though this might go on indefinitely. 
For apart from the objection that it does not fit in 
with what is known about the conduction of the 
nervous impulse, the defect of the drainage hy- 
pothesis (though it represented a step in the right 
direction) is that it is too simple. There are other 
means (as we saw in discussing chronaxy) through 
which the paths taken by impulses are controlled 
besides the wearing down of resistances at synapses 
and the differences in potential (if such occur). We 
must take account of these other ways in order to 
reach a more satisfactory theory. 

What has emerged from this consideration of the 
drainage view is that we must take account of the 
end-state of the whole process, the success or failure 
at the point which matters to the animal, if we are 
to explain the variations in the means by which this 


74 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


is brought about. In other words, all behavior 1s 
purposive, though it may often be so ill directed, 
incomplete, and confused that we cannot pick out 
the purpose. The mainspring of these conditioned 
reflexes is the dog’s need for food. If we leave this 
out of consideration we shall naturally find the 
facts difficult to explain. 

The drainage hypothesis was invented to meet a 
crucial problem. As McDougall very rightly said: 
“If no solution can be found physiological psychol- 
ogy is bankrupt.”* But he was probably too hasty 
in assuming that if the drainage theory had to be 
abandoned the only alternative would be some kind 
of “psychical guidance of the neural impulse,” in 
other words, “a directive power of psychical energy 
or ‘mind’ working in some way that we cannot at 
all conceive” (pp. 128, 134). Things working in 
ways which we cannot conceive should not be in- 
voked by science, as McDougall in 1905 clearly 
realized. Possibly the growing doubtfulness of the 
drainage hypothesis in part explains a change of view 
on this fundamental point which has much perplexed 
many of his admirers.” 


Success as Establishing Attunement. But to aban- 
don the drainage theory is not in the least to give 


* Physiological Psychology (1905), p. 126. 

*It is interesting to note that in his latest work (Am Outline of 
Psychology, 1923, pp. 179 and 280) McDougall still regards his 
hypothesis as “the only one that can interpret these facts of recipro- 
cal inhibition in the higher brain levels,” in spite of a difficulty of 
reconciling it with what is now known of the nature of the nervous 
impulse (cf. Bayliss, Principles of General Physiology, 1924, Pp. 424, 
for a discussion and references). 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS 75 


up hope of a physiological explanation. Let us see 
what can be done with the aid of the tuning or 
chronaxy theory. We must remember that the 
problem is not properly set if we merely ask how 
do the note-impulse and the food-impulse arrange 
affairs between them as regards the salivary dis- 
charge, and neglect the rest of the dog’s impulses, 
notably those which would be modified if he had 
just gorged to repletion. 

Neither the impulses from the note nor those 
from the food come into an indifferent brain. The 
latter find a center already tuned for them by the 
emptiness of the dog’s viscera. The impulses from 
the note reach this center—and they must reach 
many other centers besides. The fact to be explained 
is that after a certain number of conjunctions in this 
center with the food-impulses, the center discharges 
on the arrival of the note-impulses alone. We must 
remember that practically any stimulus in place of 
a note can be conditioned in the same fashion. Even 
a painful stimulus can. All symptoms of fright or 
pain cease and a severe pinch or bruise merely causes 
abundant salivation. Nothing brings out the interde- 
pendence of the processes in the brain better than 
this astonishing fact. Whatever sensory stimulus— 
whether from a color, a noise, a touch, an electric 
shock, or what not—immediately precedes the giving 
of the food, the impulse it arouses comes to discharge 
the center in place of the food-impulse, given suf- 
ficient repetition. 


The difficulty of understanding how this happens 


76 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


is due to thinking of the center in two phases only 
—as it is when the note-impulse reaches it, and as 
it is when the food-impulse causes it to discharge. 
Instead, we must think of it in four phases— 


(1) asit is when played upon by hunger-impulses 
before the note-impulse comes in, 

(2) as it is when this impulse has altered it, 

(3) as it is when the food-impulse discharges it, 

(4) as it is when the consequences of the arrival 
of the food in the stomach are playing 
upon it. 


This last seems to be the decisive phase in tuning 
the center to discharge henceforward on the mere 
arrival of the note-impulse. Evidently the food- 
and note-impulses together leave the neurones of 
the center in a peculiar state of tuning which lasts 
for a little while. The incoming of the impulses 
from the stomach fixes this state. Next time the 
note-impulse comes in it finds the center still tuned 
in the same way—tuned, that is, to be discharged 
either by the note or by the food, and the center 
discharges. As to how this particular tuning comes 
about, the simplest hypothesis is to suppose that the 
simultaneous or closely successive activity of two 
neurones in the center brings their chronaxies nearer 
together, so that next time, if this change is fixed, 
the one can now discharge the other. A number 
of steps may be needed for this approximation. 
Thus, in the dog, twenty or thirty may be required, 
and in the rat a much greater number. In man it 


HOW THE BRAIN WORKS ME 


can often be achieved at one stroke. Similarly, the 
time the fixation lasts varies greatly. In the dog, if 
we do not give him the note too often without the 
food, or otherwise bring in inhibitions, it lasts in- 
definitely, as it does in man. In the cockroach it 
seems to last at most half an hour. The memory 
of the cockroach is not very tenacious. 

We can now see how it is that if we sound the 
note too often without food, we break down the con- 
ditioned reflex. The tides of impulses (phase 4) 
which come to the center after salivation, from an 
empty stomach or a full, are very different; the 
tuning there, instead of being fixed, is changed. The 
note henceforth, instead of exciting the final common 
path now inhibits it. 

We have lingered somewhat over these intricacies, 
as we did over the theories of inhibition, so that the 
reader may take stock of the difficulties; and also 
that he may realize why the physiological expla- 
nation of the brain’s activities does not stand or fall 
with the success or failure of any one particular 
theory. There is still much work to be done in the 
physiological laboratory whose results will un- 
doubtedly have a direct bearing on these problems. 
The main attack has not yet been made. The work 
so far done amounts to ‘getting the guns into posi- 
tion? for that attack. So that to assume special 
‘psychical’ agents, or to maintain that the working of 
the mind is beyond the scope of any possible physio- 
logical explanation would be a rash procedure for a 
psychologist to-day. 


CHAPTER V: PURPOSE AND INTEREST 


Purpose and Foresight. There is another impor- 
tant reason for looking rather closely into the nerv- 
ous mechanism of retention. Only so can we see 
its close connection with the purposive character 
of behavior. An activity is said to be purposive when 
the result which it is going to produce seems to in- 
fluence its course; that is:to say, when what is 
about to happen seems to be directing and controlling 
what is already happening. This kind of apparent 
causation by what does not yet exist, by the end or 
goal of an activity, is known in philosophical language 
as teleology and has always seemed a very mysterious 
affair. Many thinkers have regarded it as neces- 
sarily involving ‘foresight,’ meaning thereby some- 
thing which no physical or physiological processes, 
however intricate, can explain. And unless we have 
an adequate conception of these intricacies, and 
especially of the ways in which retention complicates 
them, this view is very difficult to avoid. For this 
apparent foresight is entirely due to retention. It 
is due to the ways in which the effects of past activ- 
ities control the present. When we seem to be 
influenced by what is about to happen, by the results 
to come from what we are doing, we are really being 
influenced by the lingering effects of what has 
happened on former occasions in similar situations. 
And we are constantly being so influenced; in fact, 

: 78 


PURPOSE AND INTEREST 79 


nothing that we do is immune from the influence of 
similar situations in our past or that of an ancestor. 
So it is perfectly correct to say that all our behavior 
has the peculiar character of purposiveness, a char- 
acter not possessed by such physical processes as 
are involved when stones fall or clouds form or 
earthquakes rage. But we should realize that this 
purposiveness is a physiological characteristic, that 
it is due to retention in living tissues and pre- 
eminently in the living systems which form the 
higher nervous centers. Physiological processes are, 
in the opinion of the most circumspect authorities, 
merely extremely complicated physical processes. 
The more complex systems which make up living 
tissue naturally behave in more complicated ways 
than the simpler systems of physics. 

Retention and Attunement. We take retention 
then as a fundamental fact in the working of the 
brain. We have seen that it does not necessarily in- 
volve any storing up of impressions or images, or 
any laying down or scouring out of new paths or 
channels. To say that the brain retains a response 
is to say that certain stimuli may find it in the state 
of attunement in which that response left it, and 
that therefore if the situation recurs it will respond 
in the same way. This, of course, does not bar out 
the possibility of persistent modifications. 

Recognition. So far we have discussed retention 
only as it appears in the simplest form of conditioned 
reflex. We shall see how universal the influence of 
the past upon the present is if we reflect upon some 


80 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


of the less simple forms. Consider the sensory co- 
ordination centers which we discussed above, and the 
way in which they pick certain patterns out of the 
welter of incoming impulses. The center by which 
we recognize a series of sounds as being a certain 
tune is a good example. The first time this series 
of impulses comes into the center we do not, of 
course, recognize it. But, since we have presumably 
heard other tunes before, it does not find the center 
unprepared, and we have probably heard the same 
notes before. Each note has its own special effect 
upon the center and is handed on as a special set of 
impulses different from those due to any other note. 
Further, each note leaves the center ready to deal 
with some notes better than with others. As the 
tune proceeds a cycle of operations takes place in 
the center, easier for some people than for others 
(what is called “a good musical ear” is really a 
good center) and easier if the tune is of a familiar 
kind, and if the transactions required in passing 
from note to note are fairly simple. Quite early, 
on, after two or three notes perhaps, back into the 
center come the consequences of the passing through 
of these notes. Every impulse that the center hands 
on has a widespread reverberation all over the body 
and the effects of these reverberations come back 
to the center and take a share in handling the fol- 
lowing notes. This is why the earlier notes seem 
to make so much difference to the later ones. The 
later notes have actually to be handled differently 
by the center because of the effects of the earlier. 


PURPOSE AND INTEREST SI 


Finally the tune is completed, the last of the rever- 
beration effects comes in and the center is left more 
or less set for the handling of this tune in future, 
according as these reverberations are more or less 
satisfying to the whole organism. The process is 
quite parallel to that in Pavlov’s dog. Of course 
what constitutes a satisfactory reverberation will 
differ enormously from man to man, varying from 
grade to grade of musical knowledge and taste, and 
from temperament to temperament, and an unsatis- 
factory tune may ‘stick in the mind’ for any one of 
a thousand extraneous reasons. A man may have 
heard it while burgling a till, for example. Or the 
tune, while in a crude sense unsatisfying, may be 
musically interesting in some way. Still in all these 
cases what determines whether the tune is retained 
or not is the character of the impulses playing upon 
the center from other sources, while the tune is 
going on or immediately after. 

When the tune is heard again and recognized, 
it is not in the least necessary, as everyone knows, 
to recollect the occasion on which it was formerly 
heard. The burglar probably will, but most people 
commonly do not. All that is involved in mere 
recognition is that the center is, on the second oc- 
casion, after the first few notes, set ready for the 
rest of the transaction. It has been transformed in- 
to a lock, so to speak, for which that particular tune 
is the key. Clearly, one and the same center may 
be concerned in the handling of innumerable tunes. 


82 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


This offers no difficulty if we realize its prodigious ~ 
complexity. 

On this second occasion not only are the later 
notes influenced by the earlier, but also the earlier 
by the later; to put it more accurately, they are in- 
fluenced by the still enduring effects of the notes 
which followed on the former occasion. This 
explains why a tune, though recognized as the same, 
yet often sounds very different on repetition, and 
why it is so easy to hear some tunes too often. 

We have taken this instance partly for its own 
interest, since an understanding of what is actually 
happening clears up much that is often considered 
mysterious, even miraculous, in music. But there 
was another reason. The recognition of a melody 
with the apparent knowledge of the future which 
it seems to entail is a favorite example with those 
psychologists who maintain that the mind must have 
powers beyond the capacity of the brain. We 
have seen that foresight (of a kind) does occur and 
also in what this foresight consists. 

Interest and the Selection of Patterns. All recogni- 
tion of other people, of our own name, of words, 
of places, of tables and chairs, of moods and 
emotions, of situations large or small, part or whole, 
is done in this fashion. The plan of the universe 
as we see it is the plan of the persistent accords in 
our nervous centers, the plan of the patterns by 
which we handle our stimulation. And as our in- 
stances have brought out, these patterns depend not 
only upon what is given in stimulation to our sense 


PURPOSE AND INTEREST 83 


organs, but still more upon the relative satisfaction 
to us as integral individuals of picking out one pat- 
tern rather than another. The universe may be and 
probably is, shouting at us all the time the clearest 
and most unmistakable news. Perhaps news which 
in the long run might be of overwhelming importance 
to our welfare. But if the immediate consequence 
of picking out the pattern of these ‘messages’ is un- 
comfortable, or if it involves ceasing to pick out a 
pattern which suits us, we shall not hear them.’ 
The world as we ordinarily regard it, the world of 
roads, gardens, motor cars, noises, colors, bodies, and 
even of brains, is the indirect reflexion of our 
interests, since it is these which ultimately pick out 
the groups of stimuli which we treat as single things. 

Hence it is that the conceptions even of homely 
and familiar objects—the wood in the grate, the 
wine in the wood, the billiard table, or the household 
cat—entertained by people of different interests can 
vary so immensely. The accounts given of the wine 
by the chemist and the connoisseur are far removed. 
The ordinary man is satisfied with an idea of a 
cannon which the physicist (as a physicist, not as a 
billiard-player) rejects i toto. And how the 
physiologist regards the cat may be gathered to some 
extent from these pages. The problem of how we 
are to pick and choose among these points of view 


* As Professor Thurstone puts it [The Nature of Intelligence 
(1924), p. 9], “while walking to your office . . . most of the signs, 
stores, vehicles, and people are indifferent stimuli which are not 
even perceived because you do not identify them with your purpose.” 


84 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


—which patterns to select—cannot be avoided by a 
psychologist. And he is, or should be, the man of 
all men who is best placed for considering it, since 
it is his job to study this choice between patterns and 
also the factors by which it is controlled. 

In actual fact we pick out the pattern which best 
fits in with the dominant activity. Pavlov’s dogs 
pick out the note and treat it as a signal for saliva- 
tion because food-seeking is their dominant activity. 
The errand boy picks up the tune because whistling 
is his. The physicist at the billiard-table discards 
all thoughts of electrons because pocketing the white 
is his main aim for the moment. And the psychol- 
ogist works out a conception of the nervous system 
because an intelligible account of behavior and ex- 
perience is his concern. In all cases the pattern 
picked out depends upon the purpose (conscious or 
unconscious) or interest which it serves. This is not 
to reduce truth to convenience in any ordinary sense 
of the word ‘convenience.’ 

But, to return, what are these dominant activities, 
these purposes, these interests, which pick and choose 
among possible patterns? Are they, too, conceivable 
in terms of the nervous system or have we here at 
last to abandon physiology and introduce something 
not of a physical order, in the form of psychic urges, 
instincts, wants, desires, strivings, an élan vital or a 
libido? Can these, too, be brought under our scheme 
of connected brain centers influencing one another 
and handing on impulses to one another, forwards 
and by backwash? And lastly how do these interests, 


PURPOSE AND INTEREST 85 


besides selecting what shall come in, also decide 
what goes out, and how do they translate the inner 
swirl of impulses into overt action? 

If we compare the body to a self-directing and 
self-regulating machine, however inappropriate from 
some points of view the comparison may be, we shall 
at least be reminded that, like an engine, it needs 
fuel. It uses up its supplies of energy and has to get 
more. Further, and here it differs from those simple 
physical systems we call engines, it dies unless it 
subdivides from time to time. In lowly animals 
the subdivision is simple; in man it is complex and 
involves endless to-do. Again, man is a social 
animal. He cannot get on by himself and has to 
live ina herd. This also involves a vast ramification 
of consequences among which speech, sanitation, war, 
and the great majority of mental diseases are ex- 
amples. We might go on extending the list of man’s 
needs. Food and sex are the original roots of a good 
many of them, but there are probably others, as we 
shall see in Chapter VII. 

Man’s Fundamental Needs. A Need isan internal 
disequilibrium. If it continues unappeased the efh- 
ciency of the organism often declines. The three 
needs we have mentioned, food, sex, and society, are 
apt to be fatal unless supplied. Reproduction as a 
way of escape from death strikes the ordinary man 
as unsatisfying—but from the point of view of the 
biologist a man may be said to live on in his offspring. 
Deprived of society, the infant only lives a few 


86 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


hours, the child a few days, and the adult is rapidly 
impaired in a number of ways. 

On primitive needs derivative needs become 
grafted. For example, food-seeking, except for a 
very few fortunates, involves locomotion. Now 
unless the locomotor apparatus is employed a detri- 
mental condition arises, so that even persons who are 
regularly fed by others find they have to take ex- 
ercise. A derivative need arises. In general, 
though there are exceptions, the possession of a 
capacity involves a need to employ it. This is more 
obviously so when the capacity has developed special 
structures in the body—noteworthy biceps, for ex- 
ample: the sad state of the retired boxer or oarsman 
is frequently remarked. Where mental capacities 
are in question there is more doubt. The need of the 
mathematician to keep up his studies, or of the stamp- 
collector to go on collecting, is less certain. Even 
here it will perhaps be agreed that, other things 
being equal, if no other interests can be found, they 
will be well advised to continue. 

Another way in which needs ramify involves the 
principle of the conditioned reflex again. If I con- 
tinually drink tea while I am working I may find 
in time that I need tea in order to work. The centers 
involved have become tuned to work best in the tea- 
intoxication condition. Such drug addictions are a 
very clear example of acquired needs. My state, 
however, when deprived of tea is not of necessity 
detrimental to all my activities, but only detrimental 
to the work. 


PURPOSE AND INTEREST 87 


We all suffer from innumerable parasitic and con- 
ditioned needs of this kind. The lecturer who can- 
not get on unless he fidgets with the chalk, the dandy 
who cannot shine in conversation unless his attire is 
elegant, are obvious instances. The great Kant was 
not at his best unless his gaze was fixed upon a certain 
tower across the way; in the course of years a 
neighbor’s tree grew up to intercept this vision; the 
owner had to cut it down before the Critical Phi- 
losophy could proceed. 

Fixations. A very important group of these con- 
ditioned needs are what the psycho-analysts call 
fixations. A child whose tenderness and affection 
have for a long time been centered exclusively on 
its mother often finds it difficult to feel these emo- 
tions towards anyone who does not resemble the 
mother in certain respects. Many other instances 
from the pathology of the mind will arise for con- 
sideration later. We have said enough to make plain 
how universally operative conditioned needs are, and 
can pass to the problem of interests. 

The Nature of Interest. An interest is an activity 
set going and maintained by a need. There is no 
mystery (as opposed to intricacy) about the way in 
which the need provokes the activity. The dis- 
equilibrium which is the need fires volleys of impulses 
into the centers, and their response to this bombard- 
ment is the activity. They respond when they can. 
But the rest of the situation has to be fitting. We 
often have intense needs about which nothing can be 
done. The interest then is latent except in so far 


88 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


as internal processes go on in the nervous system 
with a view* to finding some aspect of the situation 
or making some change in it which will allow some- 
thing to be done. Sometimes we can only wait for 
achange. Then when the change comes, the activity 
starts in what seems an entirely spontaneous fashion. 
Our interest leaps to life, as we say. The change 
may seem to be utterly inadequate to account for it. 
We must not forget that the need is the other and 
the controlling factor. A man’s needs are not neces- 
sarily the measure of his interest. For more than a 
mere need is required before an interest develops. 
There must also be the nervous organization neces- 
sary in order to translate the need into activity. A 
man in a coma is in a desperate state of need, but he 
shows the minimum of interest. 

We should be on our guard constantly as to how 
we use quantitative terms in speaking of interest. 
The danger is that we easily get into a way of think- 
ing of it as a fixed quantity of energy. But there 
is no physiological ground for such a view and the 
psychological evidence which suggests it can be better 
interpreted otherwise. For example, it is true that 
one interest can oust another, but this is not the same 
thing at all as a central fount of energy being 
turned into a new channel. It isa much more com- 
plex transaction involving a rearrangement of prec- 

* Having now an account of purposive activity in terms of repeti- 
tions of previous sequences of experience, we need no longer hesi- 


tate to use such language. Note that these operations need not be 
COMSCLOUS, 


PURPOSE AND INTEREST 89 


edences in the central clearing-houses. And a 
heightening of one interest is very often accompanied 
by a general heightening and widening all round. 
Compare the sleeping man and the fully vigilant. 
The Napoleons, the Goethes, and the Newtons, the 
men of the most intense interests, are commonly also 
the men with the most quick and varied simultaneous 
interests. The theory of the central reservoir is too 
crude. It reaches its highest absurdities in the hands 
of some psycho-analysts who are in the habit of ask- 
ing where the libido has gone whenever an interest 
lapses. We can avoid these mistakes best by remem- 
bering that interest is not something additional to or 
behind activity, but just the activity itself. 
Discrimination. Width, variety, and keenness of 
interests are marks of the superior mind because they 
are signs that in one respect at least the nervous sys- 
tem is well organized. But they may be accompanied 
by extreme stupidity. Sensitiveness as well as interest 
is necessary. Interest is a matter of the excitability 
of the centers concerned. Sensitiveness has to do 
with the delicacy and plasticity of their tuning. The 
sensitive man is he who discriminates when he is 
interested. The stupid man is he who does not; and 
discriminating is simply varying the response as the 
situation varies. Since it is essentially plasticity of 
tuning, it is closely connected with retention. The 
discriminating are those who retain the relevant 
effects of past experience. Too intense an interest 
seems often to hinder discrimination. We get ‘ex- 


gO THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


cited,’ as we say, and no longer know what we are 
doing. 

The Initiation of Action. The arrangements by 
which activity in the nervous system is translated 
into bodily action through the outgoing (efferent) 
nerve paths are very similar to those by which im- 
pulses from the sense organs are sorted, co-ordinated, 
and associated in the incoming (afferent) path, and 
can be very briefly described. The association centers 
discharge into certain incito-motor centers which are 
among the best known regions of the cortex of the 
brain. These lie in a band roughly from ear to ear 
over the top of the head. If we give them a mild 
electric shock, as has been done by Dr. Harvey 
Cushing with the consent of a patient, the subject 
moves his limbs and does so with a full sense that 
he is voluntarily performing the action. This is 
quite different from the effect of stimulating the 
motor nerves in the spinal cord, or nearer still to 
the muscle. Then the patient merely feels his limb 
contract involuntarily. The bearing of these facts 
on the question of the Will is obvious. 

The area in the cortex corresponding to separate 
groups of muscles varies, not with the number or 
size of the muscles, but with the variety and fineness 
of the movements they combine to produce; in other 
words, with the extent of co-ordination which is 
possible for them. Thus corresponding to the sensory 
co-ordination centers we have motor co-ordination 
centers, and these are at several levels. For familiar 
acquired movements, of which typewriting and 


PURPOSE AND INTEREST gI 


swimming are examples, the impulse from the incito- 
motor center goes to a co-ordination center which 
discharges outwards a much more complicated pattern 
of impulses of a more stereotyped kind. These again 
probably have to be further elaborated and adjusted 
when they get to the spinal centers, whence they 
proceed along the final common path to the muscles. 
The analogy to a man playing a pianola is illu- 
minating here. The incito-motor center selects the 
roll to be played and controls probably the tempo 
and expression; a mechanism relatively without in- 
itiative does the rest. 

But even here the backwash effect, which we have 
noticed all through the working of the nervous 
system, comes in. In the muscles and their allied 
structures, the tendons and joints, are certain sense 
organs (known as the proprioceptors) whose business 
it is to keep the higher centers in touch with the 
movements of the limbs. The effect of the outgoing 
motor impulse which results in movement is im- 
mediately reported to the appropriate center. The 
headquarters’ co-ordinating these impulses seems to 
be in the cerebellum (cf. Fig. II); and they have 

* The elaborate researches of Magnus and Klejn (Kérperstellung, 
1924) on lower animals (and Walshe’s work on similar reactions 
in Man) bring out the complicated nature of Postural Tone; through 
reflex action the movements not only of the head but of the limbs 
are co-ordinated into one system of postures, without necessary 
reference to cortical intervention. In his Elementary Nervous Sys- 
tem, Collins has traced the nature of reflex action back to the very 
lowest animal life, in which a nervous system can hardly be posited. 
A systematic and co-ordinated study of the nervous processes in all 


animal life which lie behind action and response has been made by 
Herrick (The Neurological Foundations of Animal Behavior, 1924). 


92 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


also for the most part to be adjusted with the im- 
pulses incessantly coming in from what is called the 
labyrinth—a set of organs in the ear which play the 
chief part in securing our balance. When we re- 
member that every time we move an arm or turn the 
head when walking, hundreds of other muscles must 
make compensating movements or we shall fall over, 
it is easy to see that special co-ordinating arrange- 
ments are required. Even more complicated reflex 
co-ordinations maintain, whenever possible, our 
orientation. 

The remaining transactions of the nervous system, 
notably those involved in pleasure and pain, in 
reasoning, and in the phenomena of deliberation, 
resolve, belief, prejudice, and suggestion will be dis- 
cussed at a later stage when the introspective account 
of the mind is before us. Emotion will also be 
treated separately, and this account of the incomings 
and outgoings of the central nervous system is thus 
not complicated by a discussion of that other nervous 
system known as the involuntary or sympathetic 
(autonomic) which is essentially concerned with our 
vegetative life. 


CHAPTER VI: THE GROWTH OF THE 
MIND IN ANIMALS 


The Comparative Method. There are two ways of 
tracing the growth of the mind. We can take a series 
of animals from various levels of the biological scale 
and compare their behavior, making cautious guesses 
at the kinds of experience which are likely to ac- 
company it. Or we can study the development of 
behavior and experience in the child as he grows 
up to manhood, supplementing this by comparisons 
between individuals who more or less perfectly 
achieve maturity. Both methods are instructive and 
the first naturally leads on to the second, since the 
most accomplished animals—chimpanzees and goril- 
las for example—seem, except as regards language, 
to reach and to stop short at about the stage at which 
a bright three-year-old child begins. Moreover, by 
studying animal behavior we are likely to avoid some 
of the errors which a too exclusive preoccupation 
with the child’s mental life, as seen through its effects 
upon that of the adult, may introduce. The theories 
of psycho-analysis are peculiarly exposed to this 
danger. 

Much of the difficulty of psychology has in fact 
arisen through studying mind in its most complex 
form in man. The minds of animals are much 
simpler than those of men, and, though more diffi- 
cult to observe, are more easily understood when once 

93 


94. THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


satisfactory observations have been made. Even 
very lowly organisms such as Ameeba display be- 
havior which to some has seemed to indicate a rudi- 
mentary mind. But in animals with a nervous system 
we are on firmer ground, and it would be strange if 
a study of their behavior did not throw light upon 
our own. Man has developed certain of their 
capacities to an incomparable height, but though his 
activities are more complicated, they are still the 
same in essence. : | 

The Nature of Instincts. Ants and bees have 
always been recognized as offering supreme examples 
of instinctive behavior, and the notion of an instinct 
is fundamental to psychology. To understand what 
an instinct is we need the notion of heredity. Every 
living creature begins life with a definite congenital 
make-up, a set of innate arrangements for coping 
with the situations in which it finds itself. In the 
insects, which usually have to fend for themselves 
from the first, these arrangements include innate 
neural tunings (dispositions as they are called) 
through which a particular situation, a particular set 
of stimuli, leads to a particular kind of response, 
sometimes extraordinarily definite, complex, and ap- 
propriate. This activity, which needs no learning 
and has no previous history, is said to be instinctive. 
And each well-marked kind of response correspond- 
ing to a well-marked kind of need and situation is 
called an instinct. There is no reason to suppose 
that instincts differ in any respect from other non- 
instinctive activities, except in being due to innate 


GROWTH OF MIND IN ANIMALS 95 


arrangements in the nervous system and not to ar- 
rangements which have been formed in the course 
of the vicissitudes of the individual’s life. It is 
important not to regard an instinct as a peculiar kind 
of supernatural force or wisdom. It is no more 
mysterious, though no less, than any other of the 
animal’s activities. 

Instincts are not necessarily immutable. The 
nervous arrangements on which they depend are 
modifiable in greater or less degree. Different 
species and different individuals even of the same 
species vary in their capacity to modify their be- 
havior. 

Thus wasps, for example, will enlarge the en- 
trance to their nests when trial has shown that a 
spider cannot be dragged in, and ants which have 
been tricked into leaping from an eminence into 
vinegar refuse in the future, for a while at least, to 
take similar leaps. That is to say, they show evi- 
dence of having ‘learned by experience.? Their be- 
havior, instead of being governed solely by innate 
arrangements in their nervous systems, is modified by 
their own individual experience. It becomes a blend, 
in other words, of instinctive and ‘intelligent’ be- 
havior. But if we pass from the insects to the 
vertebrates we find that this new factor of ‘intelli- 
gence’ increases immensely. It is comparatively 
powerless in the insect and its effects are brief. The 
cockroach, as we saw, forgets its lessons in half an 
hour, the elderly ant and the youthful behave in a 
very similar fashion, but for the young chicken, the 


96 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


puppy, and the young chimpanzee life has much to 
teach which is learned with great readiness. 

Instinct and Intelligence. This distinction between 
instinct and intelligence is sometimes difficult to 
grasp, largely because ‘intelligence’ is an ambiguous 
word. As opposed to ‘instinct’ it means only that 
the behavior which shows it is due in part to the 
individual past history, the acquired experience of 
the animal. Intelligent behavior, in other words, 
depends upon retention, and retention we studied 
in the last chapter. Instinctive behavior, by contrast, 
is due to innate congenital factors. All behavior, 
even that of the genius among men, is a blend of 
the two, though the relative importance of congenital 
and acquired factors varies enormously. But there 
is another sense of ‘intelligence’ which confuses this 
distinction. ‘This refers to the comparative aptness 
of the behavior. Acquired behavior is usually, 
though not always, more appropriate, more success- 
ful, more useful, than instinctive. Compared with 
even the chicken, not a marvelously intelligent 
animal, the insect often seems stupid. The fatuous 
performance of a ‘blue-bottle’ on a windowpane is a 
good example. Revelant circumstances have changed, 
but the fly’s behavior remains the same. Hence we 
tend to judge the ‘intelligence’ of a performance 
by its appropriateness. But we should remember that 
some purely instinctive conduct is extraordinarily apt, 
and that intelligence can lead to disastrous follies. 
The essential distinction lies in the extent to which 


GROWTH OF MIND IN ANIMALS 97 


congenital and acquired factors are governing the be- 
havior. 

The Process of Learning. Almost all behavior, we 
have said, is a blend of the two. How exactly do 
these two factors co-operate? And are we right in 
regarding them as separate factors? Let us consider 
a simple case. A newly hatched chick begins very 
early to peck at and swallow small objects. This 
is instinctive behavior. At first it may get one in five 
of the objects pecked at; after ten days it gets four 
out of five, which seems to be the best it cando. The 
improvement is partly due to learning and partly to 
maturation. As it grows older its instinctive arrange- 
ments work better, but exercise assists this matura- 
tion.” So far as learning is at work, intelligence, in 
its lowliest form, is showing itself. The same thing 
happens with the flight of even the young swallow. 
It improves. But before long the chicken pecks at 
something, orange peel, for example, which is dis- 
tasteful. The peel is at once rejected. Now note 
what occurs after a few of these distressing ex- 
periences. In the normal case, even though hungry, 
it refrains entirely from pecking. Something has 
been acquired which modifies its behavior. The sight 
of the peel no longer prompts the natural instinctive 
response. What exactly has happened? This proc- 
ess, known as ‘acquirement of meaning,’ is so im- 
portant and psychologists are so at variance upon the 
account to be given, that a close study is very 
desirable. It leads us straight to the central principle 
involved in the growth of the mind. 


98 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


The observable facts are not disputed, but only 
the interpretation to be placed upon them. Un- 
doubtedly the chick shows on the second occasion that 
it has learned something through the first occasion. 
The most illuminating controversy arises over the 
apparently pedantic point as to whether this learning 
takes place on the first occasion or on the second. 
Let us state first the view which our account of 
retention in the preceding chapter suggests, and 
then see how far it escapes the objections which are 
usually brought against such views by those who do 
not regard retention as a sufficient explanation. The 
problem is quite clear and definite. How does the 
chicken learn not to peck at an orange peel? 

The Modification of Responses. On the first occa- 
sion congenital arrangements in the chicken’s brain 
cause it first to peck at and then to reject the peel. 
The situation ‘spying the peel’ touches off an innate 
disposition, which we have seen reason to regard as 
a persistent state of tuning among the neurones of a 
co-ordination center. This disposition causes pecking 
and seizing which would ordinarily be followed by 
swallowing. But when the peel is seized its dis- 
agreeable taste touches off, in an allied co-ordination 
center, another disposition causing rejection, a set of 
movements incompatible with swallowing. Thus the 
pecking-seizing-swallowing sequence is upset. And 
the co-ordination center which responded to the situa- 
tion by setting this sequence in action is left just as 
in the case of Pavlov’s dog, in a new state of tuning 
due to the backwash influence of the rejection- 


GROWTH OF MIND IN ANIMALS 99 


response or of the taste. Which it is does not matter; 
probably both are involved. This new state of tun- 
ing disconnects the peel situation from its former 
response. Next time the peel is spied the center is 
not discharged. The chicken passes the peel by. 
And its behavior is entirely explained by the working 
of retention; what is retained being not the former 
set of responses nor the former experience but a new 
tuning, a new modification of the disposition. 

Now it has very commonly been supposed by 
psychologists that what is retained must be either the 
experience itself or the set of responses. And this 
for two reasons. First because the kind of retention 
with which we are most familiar in our own case, or 
at least which we can most easily observe, involves 
imagery. An image does seem to be a case of an 
experience being itself retained. Actually it is a 
repetition of an experience depending upon a disposi- 
tion, which is all that is retained; but it is easy to 
overlook this fact. The attempt to explain the 
chick’s actions in terms of imaging breaks down ulti- 
mately because it would leave its marked limitations 
as a thinker unexplained. No psychologist nowadays 
would seriously consider such an account. 

The reason for thinking that it is responses which 
are retained is due to the conspicuousness of habits. 
When we repeat an action frequently it gets more 
and more confirmed and fixed. This is a very 
obvious effect of retention. Thus we tend to think 
of retention as primarily a stamping in of responses. 
On the principle that we notice what happens much 


I0O0 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


more readily than what does not happen, we 
come to overlook the fundamental fact that reten- 
tion works much more by knocking out responses 
than by stamping them in. As we have already seen, 
and as we shall see again, it is the result of the 
response which knocks it out or stamps it in, and 
more responses on the whole are unsuccessful than 
successful. The young hopeful begins by pecking 
at all small objects; the experienced bird rarely 
pecks at anything which does not agree with it. 
Retention and Foresight. If we are not clear as to 
what it is that is retained, supposing it to be the 
actual experience or the response itself, or if we 
regard retention as merely a deepening of the neural 
paths actually traversed by an impulse, it is easy to 
refute a theory of learning which reduces it to reten- 
tion. For what should happen on such a theory is 
simply a repetition with increased vigor of the 
original response, pecking-seizing-rejection, or per- 
haps a muddled combination of them instead of a 
bland ignoring of the peel.* And this argument has 
been used by many psychologists against the reten- 
tion theory, and with justice so far as inadequate 
conceptions of retention are concerned. But a dif- 
ferent moral has been drawn. Professor Stout,” for 
example, after arguing that mere revival or repro- 
duction of past experience through an acquired trace 


* When the retention is lapsing as it may in time, we get tentative 
and hesitating behavior. The chick seems doubtful. 

*G. F, Stout, “Instinct and Intelligence,” British Journal of Psy- 
chology, vol. iii, pp. 237 ff. 


GROWTH OF MIND IN ANIMALS IOI 


cannot make the required difference, draws the odd 
conclusion that the original experience must have 
been intelligent. But this is only a step towards a 
renunciation of all explanation. A reference to the 
future, he continues, seems to be involved in all 
intelligent behavior. The animal ‘seeks’ certain 
future results. But mere reproduction of the past 
will not give this reference to the future. Hence 
this reference must have been present from the first. 
And “such a power can in the last resource only be 
accounted for as involved in the fundamental nature 
of that relation between mind and reality, or between 
reality and mind, which we call knowledge.” 

This is giving up the problem in the grand style. 
But Stout is perfectly correct in saying that the trans- 
action which is henceforth to make the difference 
takes place on the first occasion; it is the jar in- 
volved in the first response which retunes the center 
so far as impulses due to orange peel are concerned. 
And he is correct in stressing the importance of the 
reference to a future result, but not in regarding it 
as inexplicable. As we have seen, the intelligent 
response appears to take into account and be con- 
trolled by what would happen. Actually it is being 
controlled by what happened on former occasions; 
and this foresight and reference to the future, all- 
important as they are throughout behavior, can be 
explained without the need of any mysterious factors. 

In order that past experience shall assist in con- 
trolling present behavior with a view (as it appears) 
to the future, it is not in the least necessary that it 


I02 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


should be revived in the form of memory. The 
chick need not remember that the peel tasted un- 
pleasant. It need not, in fact, be conscious at all, 
though there are fairly good reasons based on general 
analogies for supposing that it has some kind of 
simple consciousness. Probably the peel simply looks 
unattractive to it. Such arguments as are valid on 
this point largely depend on analogy from our own 
experience. When we refuse a dish we commonly 
feel just disinclined to partake of it; we do not, as 
a rule, remember former occasions on which it dis- 
agreed with us. Some people do, but only as a result 
of giving a kind of attention to their food which it 
is very unlikely that the chick can give. When by a 
judicious wriggle we avoid falling off a bicycle we 
do not need to remember former falls. As we shall 
see later, far more of our behavior is ordinarily 
governed by such unconscious action of the traces of 
the past than by conscious recollection, revival, de- 
liberation, and decision. 

This temptation to suppose that the only way in 
which we can learn by experience is by remembering 
it, and by bringing our memories to bear upon the 
present circumstances, is responsible for most of 
the trouble which the theory of instinct has caused 
the psychologist. At present it is causing great diffi- 
culties to psycho-analysis. If we realize from the 
outset that incidents of our past constantly and con- 
tinuously affect our present behavior without our 
having any consciousness of them, we shall be spared _ 
much bewilderment when we come to consider what 


GROWTH OF MIND IN ANIMALS 103 


the unconscious may be and how to conceive it. We 
shall avoid also attributing too much consciousness to 
animals and in particular endowing them with 
conscious prevision or foresight of the ends which 
they seek and achieve. We are much less conscious 
and less prescient ourselves than we suppose. 

Intelligence and instinct are not, we have seen, 
rival or opposed forces. Intelligence is the means 
by which, through experience, we refine and elaborate 
the play of the instincts. 


Trial and Error. Now that the not very interest- 
ing chicken has served its purpose, we can pass to 
more elaborate forms of animal behavior, in experi- 
ments on trial and error. Let us consider that 
ingenious contraption, the puzzle-box. A cat with 
a need for fish is placed in a box from which it can 
only escape to gain access to the fish by pulling a 
string. The times taken on a number of successive 
attempts are recorded. It is found that they tend 
to grow less and less. The number of random 
movements which the cat makes decreases, not 
smoothly, but as a general tendency. Finally the 
cat learns to make the required kind of movement 
immediately. Often this learning takes place with 
remarkable suddenness. Now suppose that after the 
cat has learned to pull the string at once when it is 
hanging as a loop in one corner of the cage, we 
arrange the loop to hang in the middle of the box. 
What does the cat do? A bright cat is not found 
to repeat the whole series of random scratchings and 
clawings which originally led to its learning how to 


104 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


escape. Instead, after perhaps a claw or two at the 
place where the loop used to hang, it finds the loop 
in its new position and pulls it at once. This shows 
that it has ‘grasped the connection,’ as we are tempted 
to say, between pulling the loop and escape. The 
problem is to discover what this ‘grasping of the 
connection’ consists in. Is it a matter of ‘insight’ 
by the cat, or can it be accounted for merely by the 
stamping in of acquired responses? 

It is important to realize how difficult the problem 
really is, and the best way to do this is to consider 
some of the theories which have been put forward 
and how far they succeed or fail as explanations. | 

The accepted view of learning held until recently 
by most experimenters in animal psychology (Thorn- 
dike has been the initiator of most of these investiga- 
tions) was in broad outline this. Three laws were 
supposed to co-operate: the Law of Effect, the Law 
of Recency, the Law of Exercise. Different au- 
thorities have stressed these laws in different 
degrees. We are already familiar with them all. 
The Law of Effect is that, other things being equal, 
success leads to the repetition of a response, failure 
to its elimination. The Law of Recency is that, other 
things being equal, the last response is the one which 
has the best chance of recurring. The Law of 
Exercise is simply that repetition of any response 
tends to confirm it. By these three laws the response 
actually retained was supposed to be picked out of 
an original infinitely varied range of possible random 
instinctive responses, all equally likely to be made. 


_ 


GROWTH OF MIND IN ANIMALS 10$ 


The selection was supposed to be a ‘blind? selection 
not guided by any observation. ‘The cat learns to 
get out by getting out, not by seeing how to get 
out,” * is Woodworth’s summary of this view. 

One difficulty will probably have occurred to the 
reader. The theory might work if the movement 
finally made by the cat was always exactly the same. 
But in actual fact it is a certain kind of movement, 
not a perfectly specific movement, which is in the end 
adopted. The objection gets still more force when 
we find that the cat transfers the learned response 
to a different situation, pulling the loop at a different 
level and from a new angle. Quite different move- 
ments may then be required, prompted by quite dif- 
ferent views of the loop. So that we cannot be 
content with any theory which deals with this kind 
of learning purely in terms of movements and 
stimuli. For the movements and stimuli are never 
exactly repeated. Learning, therefore, cannot be an 
establishment of firm connections between particular 
stimuli and particular movements. None the less, 
as a reaction to the older, anthropomorphic views 
which supposed the cat to reason the matter out, to 
act, in fact, just as we should if we were remarkably 
stupid, this theory was a great advance in the right 
direction. 

Perception in Cats. We are forced back, then, to 
the question, What is a response? What is it that is 
learned? And to answer this we must take stock 
anew of the whole situation. There is the cat boxed 


2R. S. Woodworth, Psychology, p. 310. 


106 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


up, consumed by a lust for fish; and generally in an 
unsettled condition. Its whole activity must be 
regarded as the elaborate way in which this dis- 
turbance settles down. It bites the bars, pushes at 
them, claws and scratches, these all being either ways 
by which it has formerly escaped from somewhat 
similar situations or, if it is a very inexperienced cat, 
innate, instinctive activities. Finally it pulls the loop 
and escapes. All this happens again and again; it 
escapes at the end, sometimes of one series of scratch- 
ings, sometimes of another. In some way plainly 
the actual experience of the cat while pulling the 
loop, the particular state it is in at that moment, is 
the thing which matters. The problem is to work 
out what that particular moment of experience con- 
sists of. 

A natural suggestion is that at least an important 
part of it is the sight of the loop. But we must not 
suppose that the cat sees it as a loop or perceives it 
in the same fashion as ourselves. For if it did it 
would also act more as we do. The proper inference 
is that the cat, which at first, perhaps, does not per- 
ceive the loop at all, comes gradually with repetition 
to perceive it in some sort of way. Little by little, 
out of the whole vague perception of obstacles every- 
where, the loop gets more distinctness, not as a loop, 
but, as Koffka puts it, as “something to be pulled,” 
and it is this perception of “something to be pulled” 
which is in time, through the pulling, connected with 
escaping, and so comes to be the link of transition 
between the boxed-up situation and the escape. 


GROWTH OF MIND IN ANIMALS 107 


To see how this happens we may recall our atcount 
of the working of the brain. The cat’s co-ordination 
centers are under strain, thanks to its need to escape. 
The release of strain which follows escape tends to 
fix, in the co-ordination centers, the pattern which 
immediately precedes it. In the case of the cat, 
when in so unusual and difficult a situation as this, 
a number of repetitions are required for this pattern 
to become fairly fixed. It is a new type of pattern 
for the cat, and thus easily evanesces. The cat makes 
no such to-do about getting through the door which 
is opened by the pull, or about going to the fish and 
eating it once the escape is effected. 

This account, by which not a particular movement, 
but a perception, a sighting of the loop as ‘something 
to be pulled, is the heart of the response, gets over 
the main difficulty we found in the accepted theory. 
The cat learns not to make a certain movement, but 
to pull the loop. What is acquired is not a particular 
response, but a disposition, just as we saw must be 
the case with the chicken and the peel; in this case a 
disposition to perceive the loop as ‘something to be 
pulled’ and as the beginning of a transition towards 
escape. But let us consider this perception more 
closely. How far does it involve an insight by the 
cat into the situation as a whole? Only to a very 
slight extent. Only to the extent that, as opposed 
to the view of the Thorndike school, the learning 1s 
not merely a new connection, between a given situa- 
tion and a given response, built up out of the cat’s 
pre-existing repertory of reactions. The cat’s world 


108 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


does now contain a new kind of thing. Its receptive 
centers are capable of handling a new pattern—and 
this, but nothing more than this is what is meant by 
insight. 

The Gestalt Theory of Perception. The line of ar- 
gument which we have been following is due to 
Koftka and Kohler, the leaders of what is known as 
the Gestalt School in Psychology. This is a vigorous 
movement, which has had the great merit of galvan- 
izing into new life an immense number of problems 
which showed signs of congealment in a kind of 
semi-solution. The watchword of the school, the 
Gestalt, is peculiarly hard either to translate or to 
define. Words which have been suggested as equiv- 
alents in English are ‘form,’ ‘shape,? ‘configuration,’ 
‘pattern,’ ‘unitary structure,’ and ‘functional disposi- 
tion,’ but none of them is very illuminating. 

We have to gather what kind of thing a Gestalt is 
chiefly from the instances which we are given. The 
cat’s new perception of ‘something to be pulled’ in 
this case is such an instance; the chicken’s pecking- 
seizing-swallowing instinct is another; so is the tune 
Whose recognition we studied in the preceding chap- 
ter. Or more accurately, in all these cases the states 
of tuning in virtue of which the cat perceives the 
loop, the chicken gets its food, and we recognize the 
tune are instances of Gestalts. A Gestalt in psy- 
chology, in other words, is a disposition, conceived 
not as a fixed pathway among neurones, but as a 
system which has a certain end-state, a certain poise 
to which it tends under a given set of conditions. 


GROWTH OF MIND IN ANIMALS IO9 


Gestalts, however, are not confined to psychological 
phenomena; they are to be found throughout nature. 
Koffka, quoting Kéhler, illustrates the conception of 
a Gestalt by reference to an experiment with soap- 
films originally due to Van der Mensbrugghe. A 
loop of fine silk is taken which is tied inside a wire 
ring. The whole is then dipped in soap solution 
so as to produce a film. The loop A floats in the 
_ film, and can be moved into any shape we please 





Fic, VII 


(Fig. VII). The film inside the loop is now broken 
by touching it with a piece of filter paper cut into a 
fine point. At once the loop is drawn into a circle 
by the tension of the film surrounding it (B), and can 
be felt to resist attempts to change its shape. 

“Tn this example,” Koffka writes, “we can con- 
ceive of circularity as the ‘end-situation,’ puncturing 
the film as the stimulus releasing the movement, 
and the movement itself as the ‘transitional situation.’ 
The same procedure holds good for all events and 


TIO THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


especially for those that issue in the nervous 
system.” * 

A compass needle which comes to rest pointing 
north and south, or an atmospheric depression which 
comes to rest over the British Isles, might equally 
well be instanced. A Gestalt, then, is a system with 
an end-state to which it tends to return when dis- 
turbed. A new Gestalt is either a new system or a 
new end-state for an old system. Imagine a compass 
needle swung among a number of electro-magnets. 
Every change now in any of these magnets will pro- 
duce a new end-state, a new position of rest for the 
compass needle. The point is the dependence of the 
‘transitional’ situation, the activity which we observe, 
upon the end-state as well as upon the stimulus 
which sets it moving. How this dependence comes 
about and especially the part played in it by retention 
we have already considered. The weakness of the 
doctrine at present is in the vagueness with which the 
relations between Gestalts are treated. The cats 
escape involves many Gestalts themselves combining 
into a larger inclusive Gestalt. What we most need 
to know is how these various Gestalts deal with one 
another. But this is a point which only further 
research can elicit. 


*K. Koffka, The Growth of the Mind (1924), p. 106. 


CHAPTER VII: THE MENTALITY OF APES 


Kéhler’s Apes. We can now pass to the study 
of the animals which are the nearest relatives of man, 
and it is to Wolfgang Kohler that we are indebted 
for a study of the mind of the chimpanzee which is 
already a landmark in the history of animal psy- 
chology. 

The great advantage of KGhler’s experiments 1s 
that they set problems which, if insight or under- 
standing occurs in apes, they might be expected to 
solve by this means—by the formation, that is to say, 
of new configurations, new Gestalts. The cat could 
not well be expected to master the mechanical con- 
struction of its box, since essential parts of it were 
quite hidden. But Kohler’s apes, being given much 
simpler tasks, had an opportunity of really showing 
what they could do. 

We will take what was perhaps the cleverest per- 
formance of Sultan, the most intelligent of Kéhler’s 
apes. Apes vary in intelligence almost as men do. 
All the animals easily mastered the use of sticks in 
dragging fruit placed outside the cage within reach. 
And from the very start they would place the stick 
correctly behind the fruit in order to draw it forward. 
There were no random movements. If the stick to be 
used lay so that both stick and fruit were visible 
together, there was, as a rule, no delay, but if they 
were widely separated, difficulties arose at first. The 

Ill 


II2 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


stick did not easily enter into the situation. It 
remained indifferent to the animal, ‘something to 
bite upon’ or ‘something to jump with’ or ‘to throw,’ 
not ‘something to fetch fruit with.’ In other words, 
the stick has to be perceived in a special way before 
it can be used; it has to be seen as a tool, as a step 
or link in the transition by which the end-state of 
securing the fruit is gained. 

A chimpanzee who is not very excited or careless 
will rarely use implements not large enough for his 
purpose. He often brings them along, but at the 
decisive moment his whole behavior changes and his 
energy flags. He may poke once or throw a too 
short stick at the fruit; “but an observer with any 
experience will have been able to indicate at once the 
moment when the fresh hue of determination faded; 
the rest, then, 1s not a practical endeavor, but merely 
the expression of discouraged desire.” * 

The Construction of Tools. The elaborate experi- 
ments of Nadie Kohts in Moscow (1914-16) were 
chiefly devoted to showing that vision plays a pre- 
dominant réle in the perceptions of the chimpanzee, 
and Kohler’s observations in Tenerife are particularly 
interesting on this point. Two sticks are often put 
together so that they look like one long stick, and 
the ape will then try to use them as such, regardless 
of the fact that they do not stay together and are 
practically useless. But are the two sticks ever com- 
bined so as to become technically useful? Sultan 
was the first to solve the problem. For more than 


*W. Kéhler, The Mentality of Apes (1924), p. 127. 


THE MENTALITY OF APES II3 


an hour he failed, poking about in various ways, but 
although he several times put one stick exactly to 
the opening of the other he made no attempt to fit 
them together. Evena suggestion from the observer 
who put one finger into the opening of the stick 
under the animal’s nose (without pointing to the 
other stick at all) was of no assistance. A little later, 
when sitting with his back to the fruit, Sultan hap- 
pened to find himself holding one rod in either hand 
so that they were in a straight line; he pushed the 
thinner one a little way into the opening of the 
thicker, jumped up, ran immediately towards the 
railings, and began to draw a banana towards him 
with the double stick. Though the sticks fell apart, 
Sultan at once replaced them, and proceeded with 
the greatest assurance to rake fruit towards him, re- 
placing the sticks whenever they slipped asunder. 
The proceeding so pleased him that he continued, 
without stopping to eat any of the fruit, to rake into 
his cage everything that he could reach. 

The Process of Discovery. The contrast of this 
mode of discovery with the supposed blind random 
scratchings of the cat in the puzzle-box is very strik- 
ing. And the contrast between Kéhler’s subtle, 
sympathetic, but not in the least anthropomorphic 
way of regarding his apes with the mere collection 
and analysis of ‘performance-times’ is equally notice- 
able. In fact, it has been suggested that some 
students of animal psychology show less intelligence 
with their problem than Sultan did with his. We 
see, however, that the learning here is not merely 


IIi4 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


a matter of a stamping in of an accidental response 
through laws of Exercise, Recency, and Effect. 
Exercise comes in, it is true, at a later stage. The 
following day Sultan did not at once fit the sticks 
together, but did so as soon as other methods had 
been tried in vain. Later on he came to fit them 
together when necessary as his first procedure. We 
shall notice another less favorable effect of Exercise 
ona later page. Recency and Effect which are really 
aspects of one and the same law come in only if we 
regard them as concerned with the fixation of the 
new pattern by which the two inadequately short 
sticks are now seen as ‘things to be fitted together.’ 
They do not explain the formation of this pattern. 
They are laws of memory, not of first achievement, 
to use Koffka’s term. 

We need to make a considerable imaginative effort 
to understand how the achievement in such a case 
as this comes about. It plainly depends to a very 
great extent upon retention, upon the animal’s 
previous acquirements in the way of perceptive con- 
figurations or, still to use Kéhler’s own term, 
Gestalts. Sultan already possessed dispositions 
enabling him to drag in fruit with sticks and to see 
two sticks touching one another end to end as one 
stick. What had to be formed was a new unity, by 
which both the perception of two bamboos as of 
different sizes and the act of fitting them together 
might be welded into the larger conative trend which 
is already causing him to seek a longer stick with 
which to drag in the fruit. The new structure forms 


THE MENTALITY OF APES DPS 


as a bridge by which the larger, already operative 
system, thrown out of equilibrium by the sight of 
the too distant fruit, passes to its end-state. It closes 
the circuit and fills the gap in the activity which is 
going on. The initial step was no doubt due to 
chance, or to an activity which had nothing essentially 
to do with the rest of the proceedings. Sultan was 
playing * with the sticks, an operation run by quite 
a different set of co-ordination and association centers 
and by different needs, when he first fitted the sticks 
together. We must not suppose that he was trying 
then deliberately to fix them together with a view 
to getting a longer stick. Chance in this sense pro- 
vided the means required; but it was not chance 
which caused the means to be used to bridge the gap. 
Sultan’s intelligence is shown by the fact that the gap 
seized at once on the means and so filled itself in. 

The most remarkable thing about the whole dis- 
covery is perhaps the extent to which the new per- 
ception worked in with, and brought into play 
with it, the animal’s other acquired dispositions. He 
was given a bamboo, for example, and a stick which 
was just too large to fit into it. Kéhler’s account 
of the methods by which Sultan dealt with this 
situation is astonishing. He bit off a long splinter 
from one end of the bamboo and then surprisingly 
tried to fit the splinter into the other end. It would 
not goin. He then set to work to bite away enough 

* Kohler remarks: ‘Play looks quite different. I have never seen 


a chimpanzee play while he was showing himself distinctly intent 
upon his ultimate purpose” (p. 113). 


116 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


of the end of the solid stick. After a while he got 
it just to go in, but not deep enough; the sticks fell 
apart when he used them. After a while he tired 
of this biting (the wood was chosen to be especially 
hard) and set to work on the splinter, finally fixing 
it firmly in the sound end of the bamboo. 

Consider the number of possible points at which 
he might have gone wrong, by spoiling both ends of 
the bamboo, for example, or working now at one end, 
now at the other, of the wooden stick. As KGhler 
remarks, “Sultan evidently had a bright day.” Again 
when the end of the larger bamboo was partially 
closed by a plug, Sultan seized the tubes, looked for 
a moment at the block in the hole, tried to squeeze 
the thinner tube into the narrow opening between the 
block and the side of the tube, failed, and straight- 
way pulled out the stopper, threw it aside, and con- 
nected the tubes. 

From these examples we see that the new percep- 
tion of ‘tubes to be fitted into one another’, itself 
demanded by the ‘food to be dragged in’ perception, 
in its turn demands other perceptions such as ‘stick 
to be sharpened’ or ‘plug to be pulled out.’ 

Some other of these apes’ activities will help to 
bring out further peculiarities of intelligence. It 
sometimes happened that when an ape had been 
practicing one activity for some time and was then 
asked to tackle a quite different problem, it would, 
if in difficulties, fall back upon the old technique. 
It would bring up a box which had been used in 


THE MENTALITY OF APES ie Or 


building, for example, when what was required was 
joining two sticks, or would open a door when what 
was needed was a jumping-pole performance. This is 
plainly a lingering effect of the Law of Exercise,— 
the old technique having fallen to the rank of habit. 
“Processes originally very valuable have a disagree- 
able tendency to sink to a lower rank with constant 
repetition. This . . . is usually supposed to bring 
_ about a great saving and it may be so both in man 
and anthropoid apes. But one must never forget 
what a startling resemblance there is between these 
crude stupidities of the chimpanzees arising from 
habit, and certain empty and meaningless repetitions 
of moral, political, and other principles in men.” + 
Kohler notes that drowsiness, exhaustion, colds, or 
even excitement favor such mistakes. 

Building Experiments. The building performances 
of the apes are especially interesting because of the 
resemblance they show to the young child’s per- 
formances with his bricks. Bananas would be hung 
up so that the ape had to pile one box upon another 
to reach them. Dragging a box to the right place 
and standing on it for a leap was easily learned. So 
even was the placing in some fashion of another box 
on top of it. The same suddenness of the discovery 
was noticed here as in the case of the double stick. 
Sultan when he failed would seize a box and gallop 
all round the room with it, showing every sign of 
annoyance; not in order to use the box in building, 


* K6hler, Of. cit., p. 205. 


IlI8Ss THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


but to give vent to his temper. This suggests that 
a good many of the cat’s supposed random move- 
ments in the puzzle-box may have really nothing to 
do with escape, but be merely the cat’s way of resent- 
ing the situation. . 

The ape’s chief difficulty in building is not to 
see that one box can be put upon another; it is to see 
how to put it so that it will stay there. And this 
difficulty the chimpanzee apparently cannot com- 
pletely solve any more than the child at a certain 
stage in its play with bricks can solve it. “There are 
practically no statics to be noted in the chimpanzee. 
Almost everything arising as ‘a question of statics’ he 
does not solve by insight, but by trying around 
blindly” (p. 154). He will poise one box corner- 
wise upon another, trying meanwhile “with con- 
centrated gravity to ascend the pinnacle. With an 
amazing stubbornness and minute care Grande re- 
peated this masterly mistake for years” (p. 163). 
Often her extraordinary gifts as an equilibrist lead 
to triumph. Grande in the photograph (Plate I) is 
retaining her painfully constructed edifice in equi- 
librium only through a careful distribution of her 
own weight. Unfortunately everything depends 
upon her not letting go of the bananas or pulling 
them down. A catastrophe occurred immediately 
after the photograph was taken. The other ape is 
the genius Sultan, who has been forbidden to take 
part in the building; the sympathetic participation 
shown in his left hand should be especially noticed. 





After Kohler 


PuiaTE I 





THE MENTALITY OF APES IIg 


Needs and Instincts. So far we have paid attention 
chiefly to the development of intelligence; this of 
course is only one aspect of the animal’s mental 
growth, though it is the aspect which has been most 
studied. We have seen, however, that the animal’s 
intelligent acts are all prompted by some definite 
need or set of needs, though we have kept somewhat 
monotonously to manifestations of one need only, 
the need for food. The reason is that this is the 
motive most convenient to the experimenter. But 
the animal’s needs are various and the question 
naturally arises, How do the chimpanzee’s needs 
compare with those of man, and what light do his 
presumably simpler needs throw upon our own, upon 
our desires, and the working of our passions in 
general? 

We must distinguish between the animal’s innate 
needs and its acquired needs. Most of man’s needs 
and many of those of the higher animals, especially 
the domesticated animals, are acquired; they are, as 
it were, grafted as primitive needs in the manner 
described in Chapter V. The chimpanzee needs no 
boxes or fishing rods in its wild condition, and if we 
consider only congenital needs our question plainly 
is the one which has been so often asked, namely, 
How many instincts are there? To this, different 
answers have been given corresponding to the psy- 
chologist’s purpose in raising the question. Thus 
Freud, having in view as simple and fundamental a 
classification of human instincts as possible, classifies 


I20 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


them into two groups, ego-instincts and sex-instincts; 
while Thorndike, wishing to keep close to the facts, 
is content to list an indefinite number of specific 
situations with the instinctive responses which they 
elicit. 

The Classification of Instincts. Another kind of 
answer 1s McDougall’s, based definitely upon a 
theory of the relation of instinct to emotion. Emo- 
tion for McDougall is “a mode of experience which 
accompanies the working within us of instinctive 
impulses,” and each instinct, “no matter how brought 
into play, is accompanied by its own peculiar quality 
of experience which may be called a primary emo- 
tion.” * This clue followed out by McDougall with 
great industry and acumen has yielded very interest- 
ing results, although the metaphysical hypotheses by 
which he supports and recommends his scheme are 
unfortunately not of equal value and have discredited 
it in many quarters. The similarity between 
McDougall’s formulation and that of Gall? suggests, 
moreover, that ‘instincts’ if treated as more than 
convenient popular terms, have all the disadvantages 
of the old-fashioned ‘faculties.’ 


*W. McDougall, 42 Outline of Psychology (1923), p. 128. 

* Illustrated by Dr. Bernard Hollander in “McDougall’s Social 
Psychology Anticipated” (Ethological Journal, vol. ix, no. 4, 1924). 
Cf. C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925). “I 
cannot pretend to believe that the psychologists of instinct, such as 
McDougall, have accomplished anything save to revive the faculty- 
psychology in an extreme form and with an amusingly pretentious 
parade of ‘science’; also Watson, Behaviorism (1925), p. 78. 


Il. 


12. 


. Pairing (mating, 


. Curiosity (inquiry, 


. Submission 


THE MENTALITY OF APES 


121 


McDougall’s list of instincts is as follows: 


Instinets 


. Instinct of escape (of self- 


preservation, of avoidance, 
danger instinct) 


. Instinct of combat (aggres- 


sion, pugnacity) 


. Repulsion (repugnance) 
. Parental (protective) 


. Appeal 


repro- 
duction, sexual) 


dis- 
covery, investigation) 


(sel f-abase- 


ment) 


. Assertion (self-display) 


. Social or gregarious in- 


stinct 
Food-seeking (hunting) 


Acquisition (hoarding in- 
stinct) 


Emotional Qualities 


Fear (terror, fright, alarm, 
trepidation). 


Anger (rage, fury, annoyance, 
irritation, displeasure). 

Disgust (nausea, loathing, re- 
pugnance). 

Tender emotion (love, tender- 
ness, tender feeling). 

Distress (feeling of helpless- 
ness). 

Lust (sexual emotion or excite- 
ment, sometimes called love 
—an unfortunate and con- 
fusing usage). 

Curiosity (feeling of mystery, 
of strangeness, of the un- 
known, wonder). 

Feeling of subjection (of in- 
feriority, of devotion, of 
humility, of attachment, of 
submission, negative  self- 
feeling). 

Elation (feeling of superiority, 
of masterfulness, of pride, 
of domination, positive self- 
feeling). 

Feeling of loneliness, of iso- 
lation, nostalgia. 

Appetite or craving in narrower 
sense (gusto). 

Feeling of ownership, of pos- 
session (protectivity, feel- 


ing). 


I22 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Instincts Emotional Qualities 
13. Construction Feeling of creativeness, of mak- 
ing, of productivity. 
14. Laughter Amusement (jollity, careless- 


ness, relaxation). 


Besides the emotions here mentioned McDougall 
also recognizes blended and secondary emotions 
(such as horror, awe, gratitude, and scorn) and 
derived emotions (such as joy, sorrow, surprise, 
anxiety, hope, and despair). The last spring from 
the facilitation or obstruction of desires. But even 
with the addition of such further complexities it is 
difficult to see why the particular emotional qualities 
in the list should be chosen rather than these, as the 
accompaniment of the instinct. Thus loneliness only 
occurs when we are deprived of social activities, and 
is replaced by feelings of hilarity and affability; and 
similarly in the final stage of successful foraging 
craving gives place to an expansive feeling of content. 
But allowing for derived emotions in both cases, 
the difference between affability and digestive well- 
being is not reducible to a difference between loneli- 
ness and hunger. Hence each of McDougall’s in- 
stincts seems to have not a single primary emotion 
attached to it, but a cycle of distinctive emotions. 

A More Fundamental Division. For the purposes of 
scientific anthropology something more fundamental 
is clearly required; and a classification based on the 
primary and derivative needs discussed in Chapter V 
will provide the essentials. Thus pairing and food- 
seeking, together with what McDougall describes as 


THE MENTALLYITY OF APES 123 


the ‘minor instincts’ of urination and defecation, occur 
cyclically as a result of internal needs—like sleeping 
and waking, and organic processes such as breathing 
and digestion; whereas escape, combat (except per- 
haps in Irishmen), and repugnance only occur in 
connection with fairly specific external situations. In 
other words, instinctive responses of internal origin 
correspond to the primitive organic needs which we 
have been discussing above. These can legitimately 
be called drives, while the others are of the nature 
of readjustments arising through the obstruction or 
complication of such prior activities. Such an adjust- 
ment repeated frequently enough (cf. Chapter V) 
may become a derivative drive. Thus escape is a 
development of the much more primitive impulse 
to remove the skin from stimuli which threaten to 
destroy tissue; and flight from a loud noise is to be 
explained in terms of pre-human conditioning. The 
social instincts arise partly from sex and partly from 
the need to co-operate in hunting or housing problems. 

Laughter. The case of laughter with its allied 
problems (the smile, tickling and the grin of 
gratification) will give the reader a good idea of the 
still undecided difficulties with which McDougall as 
a pioneer has been wrestling.’ In 1908, in his Social 

1The latest general survey of the problem will be found in 
Gregory’s The Nature of Laughter (1924). To Max Eastman’s The 
Sense of Humor (1921) must be attributed McDougall’s inclusion 
of Laughter in his 1923 list. McDougall’s article in Psyche, vol. ii, 
N. S. no. 4, April, 1922, explains his reasons for the inclusion on 
the lines of his 1913 British Association paper. Other useful studies 


of Laughter are those of Sully, 42 Essay on Laughter (1902), and 
Bergson, Laughter (E. T. 1910). 


124 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Psychology (p. 82), he spoke of seven instincts as 
being sufficient to account for “almost all the affective 
states that are popularly recognized as emotions.” 
Others, such as the instinct of reproduction, then 
played “but a minor part in the genesis of the emo- 
tions.” In 1923, the list of thirteen instincts al] 
“common to most of the mammals, and the con- 
stituents of human nature,” could hardly, in view 
of the work of Freud, put Reproduction on a less 
important plane than (say) Self-abasement. Accord- 
ingly, it is now included, along with five more, all 
on much the same level as the original seven, while 
laughter is somewhat reluctantly admitted as the 
one possible guest to avoid the unlucky number. 
As a problem picture we include a photograph of 
a chimpanzee which seems to have a more direct 
bearing on the still disputed occurrence of genuine 
amusement in an animal than any hitherto published. 

The Value of McDougall’s Scheme. Apart from 
theoretical considerations, McDougall’s scheme, 
being in accord with popular language, gives us a 
rough-and-ready means of comparing different 
animal species in their responses to similar general 
Situations, and of comparing the behavior of the 
animal in varying situations. If the reader will try 
to analyze the behavior of his dog, or that of his 
friends, by asking which of these instincts on various 
occasions are primarily concerned, he will soon dis- 
cover that the list is very serviceable. McDougall’s 
own use of it often throws light upon problems of 
behavior, though his descriptions of instinct itself 





After Kohts 


Piate I].—CuimpanzEE LAUGHING 
(or not?) 





THE MENTALITY OF APES 125 


for the most part are in terms of a hypothetical 
vitalism. ‘We have to recognize,” he says, “that 
the instincts of an animal are, as it were, its very 
essence and central core, all its bodily organs and 
functions being merely servants of the instincts.” 
And again: “The evolution of the animal world may 
properly be conceived as primarily and essentially 
the differentiation of instinctive tendencies from some 
primordial undifferentiated capacity to strive. It is 
this undifferentiated capacity to strive, this primordial 
energy, which M. Bergson has named Pélan vital, 
which others (notably Dr. C. G. Jung) speak of as 
the /ibido, and which perhaps is best named vital 
energy. We may regard the instincts as so many 
differentiated channels through which the vital 
energy pours itself into or through the organism.” ? 

This is very far from a useful way of regarding 
the instincts. For the organism, after all, is what 
we know and can observe, and an instinct is some- 
thing which we postulate for its convenience in allow- 
ing us to describe what we do observe, namely, the 
organism’s behavior and, in our own case, its 
experience. 

The Dangers of Anthropomorphism. One _ other 
temptation must be resisted before such a scheme 
can be used for the investigation of animal behavior. 
We must be chary of lending the animal, when it 
behaves much as we might do, mental processes 
similar in all respects to our own. Some apparently 
highly altruistic animal behavior, for example, is, 


*McDougall, o# cit. An Outline of Psychology, pp. 112-113. 


126 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


when closely examined, found to be very much 
simpler in its motives. As M. Giard has shown in 
his Les origines de amour maternel, the broody hen 
sits on her eggs not through any passion of maternal 
love, but to allay a local inflammation; and a capon 
suitably irritated with pepper can be turned into a 
most devoted foster-mother. Kirkman, with the 
black-headed gull, found that the bird does not 
resent the removal of her eggs, and would sit for 
the full incubating period on any object that is not 
too uncomfortable, such as a small square or circular 
box, or a golf-ball. 

Our own emotions are the clue to any scheme of 
instincts in so far as they allow us to classify our 
main activities, and the main kinds of situations which 
call them forth. We then look for similar activities 
and situations in animal behavior. But we do not, or 
should not, suppose that the emotions of animals 
very different in development from ourselves need 
have much in common with our own. 

With this very necessary precaution in mind we can 
briefly consider some of the main features of animal 
behavior which are significant for human psychology. 

Naturally the nearer we come to man in the bio- 
logical tree the more significant is the behavior. The 
passions of the ant, of the cuttlefish, or of the croco- 
dile, could we divine them, would tell us little about 
our own; but with the chimpanzee the case is alto- 
gether different. We can both conjecture them with 


‘In lit. To appear in his forthcoming The Expression of Emo- 
tion in Birds. 


SUOTOD) ONIHOLVIA, JAZNVAWIH)— J] ILVIg 


SNON 40fV 








THE MENTALITY OF APES 127 


some probability and draw comparisons with profit; 
but the experiments of Nadie Kohts to which refer- 
ence has already been made, and one of which is 
illustrated in Plate III, suggest that more depends 
on the skill and understanding of the human ob- 
server than has usually been supposed. 

The Social Life of Apes. Group phenomena are 
among the most interesting in this respect, for the 
chimpanzee’s strongest and most varied emotions 
arise through his membership of a group. As Pro- 
fessor KGhler points out, “A chimpanzee kept in soli- 
tude is not a real chimpanzee at all.” An ape sepa- 
rated from his fellows will risk his very life to get 
back to them. The group, however, shows less 
interest in the separated one. He will stretch his 
arms imploringly towards them, howling and whim- 
pering, and if they do not come to comfort him, 
will wave sticks towards them, and even throw things 
towards them, not out of anger, but in order to do 
something, no matter what, in their direction as a 
relief to his feelings. This tendency to do some- 
thing in the direction of whatever is the object of the 
emotion is very general. And what is done is not 
necessarily at all useful. 

The return of the lost one is the occasion for 
general rejoicings: “The whole group becomes very 
lively; they put their arms round him, even beat 
him a little for pleasure. . . . The oldest animal, 
who occupied a special position in the life of the 
community, was, on any such occasion, greeted by a 


128 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


universal welcome, such as was not accorded to the 
others” (p. 295). 

An attack upon one member in the presence of 
the group often produces an extraordinary dis- 
turbance. The whole group sets up a howl,’ as if 
with one voice. ‘There seems no doubt that one 
chimpanzee will genuinely defend another, and not 
in his own interest. But they differ amazingly in 
this respect as in other points of character. Thus 
some chimpanzees rarely intentionally incite the 
others to mass-attack, but the gifted Sultan, always 
inclined to pose as a martyr, continually did so. He 
seems, in fact, to have borne a remarkable resem- 
blance to many human geniuses; for instance, in his 
dislike of uninteresting jobs. “Once it was de- 
manded of him, in the evening after all the animals 
had been fed, to collect the fruit skins which were 
lying about and put them in a basket. He quickly 
grasped what was wanted of him and did it—but 
only for two days. On the third day he had to be 
told every minute to go on; on the fourth he had to 
be ordered from one banana skin to the next, and on 
the fifth and following days his limbs had to be 
moved for every movement, seizing, picking up, 
walking, holding the skins over the basket, letting 
them drop, and so on, because they stopped dead at 


*“Although the young chimpanzee uses significant sounds in con- 
siderable number and variety, it does not,” write Yerkes and Learned, 
“in the ordinary and proper meaning of the term, speak” (Chimpan- 
zee Intelligence and its Vocal Expressions, 1925). The whole ques- 
tion of animal speech, however, requires further careful investiga- 
tion. 


THE MENTALITY OF APES 129 


whatever place he had come to, or to which he had 
been led. The animal behaved like a run-down 
clock, or like certain types of mentally deficient per- 
sons, in whom similar things occur.” 

The actual sight of suffering will prompt behavior 
which looks in the highest degree solicitous and ma- 
ternal, but with chimpanzees ‘out of sight is out of 
mind.’ The ape seems to have practically no power 
of imagining. Expressions of emotion which have 
no connection with the animal’s material advantage 
are common. When punished, an imperious desire 
for forgiveness may be shown; the animal will make 
up to his human companion, with apish protests of 
friendship. Chimpanzees instantly take to little 
children and infants. 

Animal Friendships. Marked and enduring friend- 
ships are found. One day Kohler noticed in Chica 
a ‘disquieted hopping’ which he recognized as usually 
a sign of guilt, but he could not discover any offense 
she had committed. ‘Thus made attentive, I be- 
came aware that her friend Tercera was missing, or 
rather, that a piece of her black fur kept on disap- 
pearing behind a box each time I came round the 
other side of it.” Tercera was the guilty one. 

The study of the sexual life of chimpanzees has 
still to be carried out in detail. It is likely to have 
a bearing upon the vexed question of the Freudian 
theory of infantile sexuality. But even so far as 
they go at present Kéhler’s observations are of great 
interest. “It seems to me,” he writes, “that among 
these creatures sexual excitement is less specific and 


I30 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


less differentiated from any other kind of excite- 
ment than among human beings. We may almost 
say that any strong emotion, and thus any strong 
external stimulus, tends to react directly upon both 
the colon and the genitals, but not so as to give the 
impression of exaggerated and concentrated sexual- 
ity, but rather of an inner vehemence and interde- 
pendence of all vivid inner processes.” Again, 
“Even the strongest expressions of sexual behavior 
gave a very naive impression, and the drive can un- 
der normal conditions merge constantly into the rest 
of the ‘social,’ or communal, life of the group. The 
sexuality of the chimpanzee is, as it were, less sexual 
than that of the civilized human being. Often when 
two chimpanzees meet one another, they seem to 
‘sketch’? or indicate movements, which can hardly 
be classed definitely under either the category of 
joyous and cordial welcome, or sexual intimacy. . . . 
Thus chimpanzees embrace each other, with all de- 
grees of emphasis and fervor, partly as a reassurance 
of their social cohesion, but also as a consolation in 
moments of terror and anxiety, and again ‘just be- 
cause life is so jolly.” In moments of special 
cordiality they fall over each other to the ground” 
(pp. 314-316). The general significance of this 
description for the psychology of childhood we shall 
make clear later. 

Terror and Curiosity. When in doubt chimpan- 
zees scratch their heads. When surprised or appre- 
hensive or startled they display entirely human 
gestures. When frightened they fly or cling to- 


THE MENTALITY OF APES 131 


gether; it is an intriguing fact that they were most 
terrified by certain small stuffed toys, cloth donkeys 
with black buttons for eyes. “One day I entered 
their room with one of these toys under my arm. 
Their reaction times may be very short; for in a 
moment a black cluster, consisting of the whole group 
of chimpanzees, hung suspended from the farthest 
corner of the wire roofing; each individual tried to 
thrust the other aside and bury his head deep in 
among them” (p. 333). It is tempting to connect 
this peculiar terror with the influence which effigies 
so mysteriously exert in the lives of primitive people. 

Finally, for we must pass on to study these same 
activities in the child and in man, the chimpanzees 
recognized objects in photographs and, having been 
introduced to mirrors, thenceforward would spend 
hours studying reflections of themselves and of other 
things in pools, bright pieces of tin, and tiny splinters 
of glass. ‘What strange beings,” as Kohler re- 
marks, “to be permanently attracted by the contem- 
plation of such phenomena, which can bring them 
not the least tangible or ‘practical’ benefit!” 


CHAPTER VIII: MENTAL GROWTH 
IN MAN 


Tart apish cousin of the chimpanzee from whom 
we descend probably differed from him in two im- 
portant respects as well as in matters of degree. One 
was that he developed free images, and the other 
that he took to using speech, 

The Development and Uses of Imagery. The power 
to form images corresponding to the things we have 
perceived is one of the most mysterious, as it is one 
of the most obvious, of our talents. It is an entirely 
open question whether images may not occur in the 
mental processes of even lowly animals. The point 
is extraordinarily difficult to decide, since, as Huxley 
put it, “nothing short of being a crayfish would give 
us positive assurance that such an animal possesses 
consciousness” (The Crayfish, p. 89). The line of 
argument is simple. If we find in our own behavior 
certain performances which never occur without con- 
sciousness in the form of images, and if for similar 
performances in the animal we can find no reason 
to suppose that they are carried out otherwise than 
in ourselves, then we are entitled with fair probability 
to suppose images to occur in the animal. But these 
Ifs are not at all easy to settle. To take the first 
only. We commonly do use images in certain situa- 
tions—in planning a house, for example; but we can 
also dispense with them, or at least some people can. 

132 


MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN 133 


The other premise is just as shaky. How are we 
to be certain that an animal’s act is similar to one 
of our own? Dogmatism would be very rash in the 
matter, but the probable view on the whole is that 
if images do occur in the crayfish they are only ex- 
ceptional and isolated events. Anything like a train 
of images is unlikely. For otherwise the animal 
would behave differently and show more intelligence. 
The same argument applies even to the chimpanzee. 
He fails in ways which trains of images would be 
likely to prevent. 

But the child by the time he reaches the story- 
telling age (about four), beyond all doubt makes 
extensive use of images, and in two fashions. He 
uses them for practical purposes, in solving problems, 
and he uses them for emotional gratification, in 
fantasy or daydreaming, as part of the absorbing 
activity of play. 

An image (see Chapter III) is essentially a per- 
ception taking place without the normal stimulation, 
without the incoming impulses from the sense- 
organs which perception demands. It is usual to 
divide images up into types—visual, auditory, kin- 
esthetic, etc.—corresponding to the sense organs, 
which would have to be stimulated for the cor- 
responding perceptions. But this classification is 
somewhat artificial, We shall see later (Chapter 
XII) that most perceptions are very complicated, 
including commonly a variety of sensory factors. 
We perceive a table not only with our eyes, but 
through the effects of past handlings of it, for ex- 


134 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


ample. Correspondingly, an image of a table is 
rarely a purely visual affair, but more complicated. 
Sometimes, of course, one aspect will be more prom- 
inent than another. A few individuals appear to be 
entirely without imagery. For most people their 
power of imaging varies with their physiological 
state, being notably increased with the onset of 
sleep. Those much engaged in abstract thought are 
believed to have their normal imaging-power im- 
paired. These differences sometimes make psychol- 
ogy unduly mysterious to beginners who happen to 
differ in their natural imagery from the authors they 
read. On the other hand, since a man’s imagery is 
the part or aspect of his mind which he himself 
can most easily investigate, images have tended to 
take too prominent a position in psychology ever 
since the time of Locke, whose ‘way of ideas’ made 
images the foundation stone of the theory of the 
mind. Actually, however, images are not simple, 
primitive, or ultimate, but highly complex products 
arising at a late stage of development. 

In the child the first appearance of free images 
is difficult to trace, just as in the ape. There is, 
further, reason to think that the distinction between 
actual perceiving and imaging is not, at an early age, 
nearly so clear cut as it is in adults. This sharp 
separation of the actual from the imaged is one of 
the many differences between the adult’s world and 
the child’s. 

The uses of images are fairly evident; we shall 
discuss them, together with certain disadvantages, 


MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN 135 


later (see also Chapter XIII). It is enough here 
to notice that their appearance in the free form of 
trains of ideas, more or less under the control of 
purpose and design, is a very important landmark 
in the history of the mind. Our present problem 
is to trace some of the probable steps in the develop- 
ment of imagery. 

Imagery and Desire. One clue to this is the 
marked connection of images with emotion and de- 
sire. Compared with imaging, merely thinking of 
an object, an enemy, for example, tends to be un- 
emotional. Another clue lies in one of the character- 
istics of images as opposed to perceptions. An image 
is always comparatively loose and devoid of connec- 
tions. Every actual adult perception is fixed fast 
in a setting; all the rest of our contemporary 
stimulation gives it background and body; it has to 
maintain itself in relation to all this. But an image 
is, as it were, exempted from such rivalry. It floats 
relatively untroubled, hardly in time or space, and 
if subject to forces which control it, at least these 
forces are not the same as with the percept. 

We can make this last point more precise by ask- 
ing, Why does an image occur at all? A perception 
comes out of the interplay of a need and a situation. 
It is, we saw in the last chapter, a bridge by which 
the situation is used to satisfy a need. With an 
image there is, strictly speaking, no stimulus-situation, 
there is only the need, and such circumstances as 
amount to an absence of any stimulation which can 
be used to serve it. The image arises as a substitute 


136 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


for the missing situation. This is why the simplest 
imagining takes the form of ‘wish-fulfillment.’ The 
notion of ‘wish-fulfillment’ is of importance in prac- 
tical psychology, in the psychology of every-day life. 
We shall return to it in Chapter XV. The name 
‘wish-fulfillment’ is not very happy, since under 
wishes must be included both aversion and appetition. 
The essential point is that in wish-fulfillment the 
daydream or the cinema is substituted for the situa- 
tion demanded by the need. 

The wish may or may not be conscious; this re- 
mains true whichever sense we choose for the 
equivocal term ‘consciousness.” The wish is merely 
activity prompted by the need; it may take the form 
of desire, an explicitly conscious striving, it may take 
the form of fear; or it may be ignored or disowned 
by whatever parts of the mind might be aware of 
its working. For the moment which of these 
happens does not matter. 

Extensive use of imagery in practical affairs seems 
likely to be a development subsequent to this use of 
it as a direct though bodiless and illusory satisfier 
of needs. For wide experience and a very consider- 
able plasticity are necessary before imagery becomes 
of real practical service. We commonly think of 
our imagery as guiding our action. We imagine 
what we are going to do, and then do it, so runs the. 
traditional account. But ninety-nine times out of a 
hundred—as anyone who watches himself at all 
closely will agree—we actually do something else 
when the moment comes. Circumstances must 


MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN 137 


govern our perceptions and guide us to the satisfac- 
tion of our needs; our preliminary imaginings 
prompted by our needs alone, cannot. Imagining, 
in fact, if it gets out of hand isa great danger. An 
enormous number of the catastrophes of the mind 
can be traced to just this, to phantasy which is block- 
ing the ways of perception and substituting an illusory 
satisfaction for an actual solution of the problem. 

But if images are not as directly useful as we 
often suppose, imagining, none the less, has an 
indirect value as an exercise of our powers of 
perception. Through much imagining (if not too 
stereotyped) the mind may become more plastic, 
more able to form new perceptions, when the oc- 
casion demands it. 

Memory in the Child. “Imaging plays a conspic- 
uous part in child life before much personal rem- 
iniscence begins.”* Indeed, the late development 
of memory in the full sense is one of the most 
astonishing features of child life. It begins in a 
rudimentary form early in the second year, but re- 
mains very indefinite for a long while. “Even for 
a four-year-old child a definite remembrance of 
yesterday is difficult, and one of the day before 
impossible. At this age there exists a vague impres- 
sion of happenings long past, likewise a rough 
distinction between before and after, and occasionally 
one between to-day and not to-day.”? 

* James Ward, Psychological Principles, p. 179. 


*K. Koftka, The Growth of the Mind, p. 244. This may be the 
reason why we find it is difficult to recall infantile experiences. An- 


138 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Play. This vagueness and indeterminateness of 
memory in the child is probably connected with the 
predominance of play in its life. We shall never 
understand play—the most extensive activity of the 
most important period of our lives—either in gen- 
eral or in its particularities, unless we realize that 
the child’s world is almost entirely unlike ours. All 
his perceptions differ from ours, not only in def- 
initeness, but in kind. The description and analysis 
of this difference is a very valuable achievement of 
modern psychology, not only because an unsympa- 
thetic failure to realize it on the part of parents and 
others is bad for the child, but also because the com- 
mon alternative, sentimental nonsense about it, is 
even worse. 

The child’s world differs from the adult’s be- 
cause his interests are different. The majority of 
the adult’s interests do not yet exist for him, and 
therefore, the ways of perceiving which are going 
later to serve those interests do not exist either. 
Pre-eminently that way of perceiving things which 
springs from the endeavor to see them as they are, 
does not yet exist. It is true that adults differ among 
themselves in this respect, but their differences, how- 
ever important, are slight if we compare them with 





other reason is repression (cf. Chapter XIII). A third may be the 
slight extent to which a child verbalizes his experience (cf. Watson, 
Behaviorism (1925), p. 209), and a fourth is probably to be found 
in the fact that, since the child’s world is so unlike ours, memories 
of it would be of little use to us, and would involve regression (cf. 
Ch. XV). When we have mastered a subject it is peculiarly diffi- 
cult to recall our first crude conceptions of it. 


MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN 139 


the child. The young child perceives things only 
in their relation to his own needs and desires, and 
his world is a reflection of his own inner activities. 

To understand what this implies we must consider 
the peculiar, the unique helplessness of the infant. 
The young guinea-pig is independent of its mother 
in three days’ time, the young white rat in thirty; 
the young human being is still very dependent after 
three thousand days. This long subordination 1s, 
as has often been remarked, the secret of man’s 
superiority, but it is also the clue to much which is 
less satisfactory in him. As we shall see, it has 
consequences which he must eliminate when he 
finally grows up, as well as consequences which he 
must retain. 

Infantile Perception. The helpless dependence of 
the infant upon those who tend him affects his per- 
ceptions from the beginning. His first differentiated 
reactions to sounds are aroused by the human voice. 
He takes an interest in faces as early as his twenty- 
fifth day; even in the second month of his life the 
face and voice of his mother may cause him to laugh. 
After three months the recognition has developed in 
differentiation, and thereafter the child behaves 
quite differently towards familiar persons and to 
strangers.’ Facial expressions influence him by the 
time he is six months old. But what we should re- 
gard as simple forms are not distinguished until 
much later. The letter O, for example, not till the 





1W. Stern, The Psychology of Early Childhood, p. 108. 


I40 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


end of a year. These, if we consider them, are very 
remarkable facts. They imply that the infant is 
building up a view of the world very unlike that 
which at first sight we should suppose it to be form- 
ing. Unless we are careful we tend to think that 
the infant’s world begins for him as a multitudinous 
chaos of lights and contacts and noises, “a big buzzing 
blooming confusion,” as James put it, out of which 
he collects elements together and gradually combines 
them into groups which become for him separate 
things. His mother’s face on this view would be 
a combination of countless sensations, and its various 
expressions indescribably complex distributions of 
light and shade. But in fact nothing of the kind is 
going on. The infant does not proceed from the 
simple to the complex; he begins with what bio- 
logically matters for him, and this in nearly all 
cases 1s complex. 

The recognition of expressions is instructive. Few 
adults have exact ideas as to what precise contortions 
of a human visage express pleasure, friendliness, 
hostility, or pain. Unless they are artists or have 
especially studied the matter, they could usually 
give no accurate account of them, yet they constantly 
respond to them without error, and the chimpanzees 
do likewise. If the experimenter suddenly shows 
signs of extreme terror and stares at a particular spot 
as though possessed, all the chimpanzees will start 
as if struck by lightning and stare at the same spot, 
even though there is nothing of any significance 


MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN I4I 


there. The chimpanzees respond to what matters 
to them and so does the child. Nothing matters so 
much to him as expressions, and though we know 
expressions to be highly complex things, to him they 
are quite simple.’ | 

Thus the infant’s early outfit consists of percep- 
tions, not perceptions of colors, spots, sounds, and 
touches as such, but of expressions, of patterns which 
favor or thwart his activities; and on this basis of 
perceptions he continues to build up his world, for 
it is a fundamental law of the mind that so long as 
it can it will use perceptions already acquired rather 
than form new ones. The child who calls a badger 
the first time it sees one a ‘bow-wow’ and the 
philosopher who tries to bring new facts under his 
old headings are obvious instances. Conversely, the 
child’s comparatively undeveloped power of recogni- 
tion and discrimination are due to its lack of 
experience of the ways in which signs change from 
situation to situation. 

Primitive Mentality. The world of the child con- 
tinues for a long while to be modeled for him on 
these patterns; to be therefore informed with in- 
tention towards him. Not that he explicitly supposes 
it to be alive or to be thinking and willing about him. 
To do this would imply that he made a distinction 
between the conscious and the unconscious, which in 


1The reader who is familiar with the accounts given either by the 
Association Psychologists or by the Behaviorists may perhaps find this 
view paradoxical. But it is not in conflict with the theory that 
recognition of expression is conditioned. 


I42 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


fact he cannot yet make. He simply has only one 
way of regarding it. In this respect his world re- 
sembles that of primitive man, and the comparison 
between the child’s mind and that of certain people 
of rude culture is illuminating. 

All over the world, in Australia, in Africa, in 
Melanesia, and in the Arctic Circle, are to be found 
peoples for whom the idea of a mere accident in 
serious affairs even in the most obvious cases does not 
arise. When a man falls from a tree through trust- 
ing to a rotten branch, or when he is snapped up 
by a crocodile, or dies of a snake bite, or has his 
head cut open in battle, the view taken is that some 
enemy, not his own carelessness, or the branch, or 
the crocodile, the snake, or even necessarily the 
opposing swordsman, is ultimately responsible. Even 
his death through old age is put down to sorcery, 
and this view is arrived at not, as we might suppose, 
through elaborate and muddled ratiocination based 
upon a few misleading instances, but simply because 
the idea of an important happening undirected by 
some intention is too difficult for them to form. 
Their only way of perceiving serious events is to 
regard them as caused by some intention. Thus, a 
sorcerer by his magic must have made the man fall, 
or entered into the crocodile or the snake, or de- 
prived the warrior of his accustomed skill in guarding 
his head. The primitive thinker, in fact, will only 
ask questions which begin with ‘why.?! Mere matters 


* Cf. J. Piaget, Language and Thought of the Child, 1926, for a 
masterly analysis of the questions asked by a child of seven. 


MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN 143 


of ‘how’ seem to him trivial. He will point out 
that the crocodile snapped up one man rather than 
another, or snapped him up to-day, but not yester- 
day, and he is not content with any explanation 
which does not reduce this to somebody’s intention; 
so he continues to bathe just as before in crocodile- 
infested waters, confident that the saurians will not 
harm him unless charged thereto by the malice of 
some sorcerer. What he regards as the practical 
step is to seek out and slaughter the sorcerer; for 
a mere slaughter of crocodiles would only lead to 
his choosing some other means whereby to wreak 
his malice. This behavior will seem to us unbeliev- 
ably obtuse unless we realize the mental peculiarity 
in which it is rooted. It is a consequence of the 
primitive’s way of perceiving events; his set of per- 
ceptions takes no account of events which are not 
directed at somebody by somebody else. But to 
understand how this way of perceiving accidents 
comes to be so preposterously fixed, we have to notice 
another characteristic of primitive mentality, namely 
the prodigious influence of society upon it. In any 
group in which no difference of opinion exists it 1s 
almost impossible for an individual to dissent from 
the common doctrine. We shall shortly have to con- 
sider again this influence of society, of the common 
doctrine and the common practice, on the individual 
mind. Even in the most highly civilized commu- 
nities it is still overwhelmingly powerful. But our 
present task is to describe the world of the child. 


I44 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


The Play World and the Real World. His world, 
we have said, is the reflection of his interests, and 
since these interests are simpler than the adult’s, his 
is a different world. But besides being simpler they 
are more separate. For the adult and in the degree 
to which he differs from a child, nearly all his activ- 
ities are linked together and mutually influence one 
another. What he does in the morning is influenced 
by what he is going to do in the afternoon and so on. 
In other words, his various interests are integrated, 
though never perfectly. In the child this integration 
has hardly begun. And this probably explains the 
tardy development of systematic memory in him. 
His life is a multitude of pieces rather than a fabric, 
and his world corresponds. Thus a shift of interest 
has an effect upon his world which to the adult is 
dificult to comprehend. The block which ten minutes 
ago was an automobile suddenly becomes something 
to throw about, and the next moment may turn into 
a tree. How are we to picture these changes in the 
child’s way of perceiving it? 

In the first place we must be clear that there is no 
question of any actual illusion. If the block could 
be actually turned by magic into a tree or an auto- 
mobile, the child would be as surprised as we should. 
On the other hand, his perceptions of it are certainly 
more plastic than ours, because they are less definite, 
and so at the same time are his perceptions of a tree 
and of an automobile. We regard the block con- 
sistently as a wooden cube, but to the child it is only 
something which favors now one and now another 


MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN 145 


of his interests. We can, if we like, get him to see 
it as we see it, but only by giving him an interest 
in so doing. We can use his desire to please us or 
be flattered by us, for example. Similarly with trees 
and automobiles. They are not to him the intricate 
objects which they are to us, but only things which 
excite him in different ways, and these excitements 
are still easily detachable from their objects. For 
in us a block and an automobile are each inextricably 
fixed in extensive and conflicting systems of interests. 
But the child’s interests do not yet ramify and are 
still fluid. We get nearest to his condition some- 
times in our dreams when we treat one thing as 
though it was another without any difficulty or doubt, 
but at the same time without any illusion. 

This plasticity of the child’s world is gradually 
broken into by the demands which adults make upon - 
him. A certain number of his activities are allowed 
free course, others are controlled, so a separation 
grows up between the world of adults and his own 
world. The adult’s world hangs together and has 
a consistency from which his own world is free: 
But it is, therefore, a world full of opposition, con- 
stantly denying possibilities which his own world can 
realize. Thus a struggle may arise between the 
two worlds, the world of reality, as we may call it, 
and the world of desire or make-believe; and the 
outcome of this struggle is often decisive for the 
individual’s character and personality. 

The Conflict with Reality. The two worlds inter- 
act curiously. Little by little the distinctions and 


2 


146 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


interconnections forced on the child by the actual 
world get taken over into his play world. And as 
the division between them grows clearer to him, the 
attractions of the play world increase. In the play 
world he is master; in the other world of the adult he 
is constantly being coerced. But as more and more 
of the consistent patterns of the actual world get 
taken over into play, freedom here becomes more 
difficult. The crisis comes when the play world 
through this limitation—through the degree in which 
it has taken over patterns from the actual world— 
begins to offer difficulties to the child. Two paths 
are open to him. He may break up these patterns 
again and so lapse back into a freer, more ‘unreal? 
kind of activity, or he may be driven by these difficul- 
ties in the direction of an increased mastery of the 
actual world. 

To speak of this as a crisis is perhaps misleading; 
it is not a single event; it is a struggle which always 
lasts many years and may last a whole lifetime, and 
it arises not over one difficulty, but at innumerable 
points. It may be decided in one way for some 
clashes, and in the opposite way for others. To take 
a typical example: though schoolmasters for good 
and obvious reasons encourage the confusion, play 
and games are really entirely different activities! 


*It is astonishing to find many admirable psychologists confusing 
them. The distinction between pure play and games arises at every 
stage of human development. Thus private conversation among 
intimates is often play; but public debate, at a philosophical congress, 
for example, is characteristically a game. The non-competitive 


MENTAL GROWTH IN MAN 147 


Most people can remember something of the process 
of transition, and perhaps, too, something of the 
resentment the child feels when the grown-up first 
attempts this particular interference with his play. 
An afternoon spent with a bat and a ball, and per- 
haps one or two friends (though these are not strictly 
necessary ) who really participate in the activity, every 
stroke being a performance only to be equalled by 
a Babe Ruth, a Lenglen, or a Jack Hobbs, is one 
thing. A tense and humiliating endeavor to rival 
the actual performances of older and more skilled 
companions, or to escape their derision, is quite an- 
other. It is not play at all, but actual life in one of 
its most searching forms. Games, in fact, are one 
of the chief instruments by which the play world 
is broken down. 

The result of this and innumerable similar con- 
flicts is a certain balance between the amount and 
kind of energy which the individual devotes to actual 
affairs (including games) and the amount and kind 
devoted to genuine play which little by little becomes 
fantasy or daydreaming. Most people have one or 
two lines, often unknown to anyone, along which 
they continue all their lives to play—that 1s, to 
dream, not to act; offshoots as it were of the original 
dream-world which have never been drawn into the 
larger unity of coherent waking purposes. These 
are a common cause of mental troubles; for, as we 
shall see, they lead to the setting up of unreal 


sports, camping, climbing, fishing, hunting (when genuinely non- 
competitive), are play. Competitive sports are games. 


148 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


standards, of ideals which can never be attained in 
the actual world. The dreamer remains in a state 
of constant dissatisfaction with any substitute offered 
for his dream-image, or unconsciously takes refuge 
in illness to evade the test of public achievement. 


CHAPTER IX: MAN’S LINGUISTIC 
HERITAGE 


Speech. The chief social influences exerted on the 
child come about through speech. The importance 
of speech in human psychology is even yet generally 
underestimated. It is not too much to say that our 
minds differ from those of the animals because of 
speech. Its discovery was probably the origin of 
man. He came about as a distinct genus through 
it. As the comparative anatomist points out, “The 
localized expansion of the acoustic territory which 
is revealed in the most primitive members of the 
human family, must imply that the biological sig- 
nificance of hearing was suddenly enhanced at the 
time of the emergence of the human family. In 
fact, it seems a legitimate inference from the facts 
to assume that the acquisition of the power of com- 
municating ideas and the fruits of experience from 
one individual to another by means of articulate 
speech may have been one of the factors, if not the 
fundamental factor, in converting an ape into a 
human being.”* Thus it behooves us to consider 
this acquisition in some detail. 

Expressions and Names. Even in the chimpanzee, 
as we have seen, and in many far lower animals, 
a rudimentary form of speech is found. The dog 

1G. Elliot Smith, “The Evolution of Intelligence,” in Problems 
of Personality, Studies in Honor of Dr. Morton Prince, pp. 6-7. 

149 


I50 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


barks and whines, the frog croaks, and the cat’s 
virtuosity is well known, but it is better to give these 
prehuman manifestations of vocal powers another 
name. We must regard them as expressions of the 
animal’s activities; in most cases they will be expres- 
sions of fairly well marked emotions, and this merely 
expressive use of sounds must be clearly distinguished 
from their use in naming, though of course many 
sounds have both functions. 

The difference, though simple, is very funda- 
mental. A merely expressive cry arises directly 
from the animal’s need, his want, his desire, his joy 
or fear, his interest in general and it varies with this 
activity. But a naming cry arises from the percep- 
tion of a given state of affairs and varies with this 
state of affairs. Briefly we express ourselves alike 
because we are alike; we name things alike because 
they are alike. Plainly naming cannot arise until 
the animal can respond to situations not merely as 
eliciting this or that activity, but as possessing this 
or that character. But we must look rather. closely 
in order to understand what exactly this distinction 
amounts to. 

All the animal’s activity and also all that of man, 
as we have insisted in Chapters III and IV, arises in 
the course of meeting needs. Every perception, 
even, arises only as a link or bridge in a larger activ- 
ity directed to the satisfaction of some need. This 
principle seems to destroy the distinction we have 
just attempted to make between expressive vocal 


MAN’S LINGUISTIC HERITAGE ISI 


activity and naming; for naming is also an expression 
of a need. This is true; all use of speech involves 
expression; but some vocal activity involves more 
than this, involves what is known technically as 
objective reference, and it is this further use of speech 
which is man’s peculiar achievement. Our problem 
is to see just how this achievement comes about. 

The clue is to remember that the higher use of 
speech has developed out of the lower. Even in 
the earliest animal cries there is a rudiment of this 
sobjective reference.’ © The’ cry is’ a part of ‘the 
animal’s emotional reaction and the reaction is very 
definitely set off only by a certain kind of situation. 
The nightingale’s song and the frog’s croak are 
parts of their mating performances. “Speech in its 
origin,” as Malinowski puts it,’ “is a mode of action, 
not a countersign of thought,” and this is still true 
even in much later performances. “Children, sav- 
ages, and civilized adults alike react with vocal 
expressions to certain situations, whether these arouse 
bodily pain or mental anguish, fear or passion, intense 
curiosity or powerful joy.” We can see this partic- 
ularly clearly in the case of children. “To the child, 
words are not only a means of expression, but an 
efficient mode of action. The name of a person 
uttered aloud in a piteous voice possesses the power 
of materializing this person. Food has to be called 
for and it appears in the majority of cases.’ We 


* Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive 
Languages,” in op. cit. Tie Meaning of Meaning, pv. 451. 


152 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


may compare Sultan’s trick alluded to in Chapter 
VII, of inciting the rest of the apes to mutiny. In 
neither case need we suppose any explicit thought. 
Both are more simple responses than, for example, 
using a stick to drag in fruit. 

Early Stages of Communication. None the less a 
considerable degree of communion is possible even 
at this stage, as the ape’s social behavior shows. 
Since the sounds uttered vary with the situation, one 
ape is able to cause the others to respond appropri- 
ately even when they are not themselves yet in the 
situation. In social animals the cry serves instead. 
It prompts to action; it acts in this purely emotive 
way long before any explicit reflection upon, or 
recognition of, the situation can have arisen. We 
must always remember, in considering language at 
any stage, that its use in reflection, as an instrument 
of thought, is a kind of diversion of it from its 
original uses. 

It will help us to imagine some of the steps in 
this distinctively human ‘misuse of language’ * if we 
realize how confused (from our adult point of view) 
both the animal and the infant are. We make a 
distinction between our emotions, which are in us, 
and the things outside of us, which cause them, and 
between our thought of a thing and the thing itself. 
We distinguish between uttering a cry and hearing 


* There is an influential school of Philosophy, that of Bergson, 
which would have us recur, as far as may be, to the more primitive 
use, to gain thereby a more intimate sense of reality. Cf. Karin 


Stephen, The Misuse of Mind, 1922, p. 42. 


MAN’S LINGUISTIC HERITAGE 153 


it as we utter it; between the noise a thing makes 
and the thing which makes it. But the animal and 
the infant draw none of these distinctions. To them 
the world is ‘nice,’ ‘nasty,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘strange,’ ‘en- 
raging,’ or ‘familiar,’ not ‘blue,’ ‘cold,’ ‘swift,? ‘soft,’ 
‘loud,’ ‘large,’ or ‘heavy.’ In fact the mind’s first 
classifications are emotional rather than objective, 
and the first classification of all is doubtless into 
‘satisfactory’ and ‘unsatisfactory’—in respect of par- 
ticular needs. So when a social animal utters a 
danger cry the others take to flight merely because 
the situation has suddenly become ‘fearful.? If we 
suppose any more complex mental goings-on in them 
we shall be misinterpreting their behavior. Sim- 
ilarly, when the infant hears its mother speaking 
kindly, the situation merely becomes ‘comfortable, 
and its bubbling reply is merely part of this com- 
fortableness; just as the flight is part of the fearful- 
ness. The contrast drawn by the adult between the 
situation and the response in such cases only arises 
much later, and for the animal perhaps never. 

The danger and other social cries of animals can 
be regarded as primitive names, if we are careful 
to remember how unlike our own mental processes 
the animal’s are. And what they name is not any 
specific feature of the situation but the whole thing. 
At the same time the animal does not regard the 
cry as a name, as a separate part even, of the situation. 
It is inextricably part of the whole state of affairs 
even when he utters it himself. This may help us 
to understand how it is that children, savages, and 


154 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


even men eminent in the world of scholarship, so 
strangely and so persistently proceed as though the 
name were part of the thing—a tendency which is 
still exerting an evil influence upon thought.’ 

The passage from this most primitive of all uses 
of names to the civilized adult’s must have been a 
long and slow business in which increased discrimi- 
nation between situations (the development of new 
perceptions as we traced it in the chimpanzee) and 
the use of expressive sounds as a means of socially 
manipulating these discriminations have gone to- 
gether. The earlier stages are merely conjectural 
as yet. Probably some form of co-operative work 
played a large part. Apes only co-operate as it were 
by accident. Three apes each wishing to move a 
heavy box will move it together, when none of them 
could stir it alone. But their activities are not 
concerted in the stricter sense. None the less, from 
this to concerted action is not a large step, and such 
action, whether in building or in hunting, might 
easily lead to a further step in the use of sounds. 
Grunts actually the effect of efforts might become 
indicative of them, thus fixing and inciting socially 
this particular form of behavior, and so on. Upon 
the later stages of this co-operative use of language 
by primitive peoples Malinowski’s account of a 
Trobriand fishing expedition is instructive. 

The Child’s Conquest of Speech. We gain firmer 
ground as we pass from speculations to the actual 


*Cf. the author’s The Meaning of Meaning, Chapter II, for 
much evidence of this tendency and this influence. 


MAN’S LINGUISTIC HERITAGE  I155 


observable behavior of the savage and the child. 
The infant’s first articulated words, his mamd, for 
example, should be regarded not as names, but more 
as single word sentences analogous to the adult’s 
commands or appeals. They are specialized cries 
for help, and are entirely of an expressive character 
springing directly out of the infant’s original needs. 
Thus they are not very far removed from the exiled 
chimpanzee’s appeals to his companions. But, as 
a rule, about the middle of the second year of life, 
a change takes place. A sudden increase in vocabu- 
lary combines with a thirst for names. The child 
makes what the Sterns describe as “the most im- 
portant discovery of his life,” namely the discovery 
that things have names. Naturally he jumps to the 
conclusion that everything has a name, a conclusion 
which sometimes causes perplexity to his parents; 
and from this he goes on to treat his former appeal- 
words as names, to regard the name as part of the 
thing, to invent names for things on the ground of 
a resemblance between the thing as it appears to him 
and the name, to transfer names to other things 
which for him are similar, and to combine names 
already acquired into new names for new and more 
complex objects. Even general words such as ‘this’ 
or ‘one’ or ‘make’ get used freely at a very early 
age. 

Imitation. In all this eager and triumphant activ- 
ity in which the child achieves what often seems to 
be the greatest intellectual performance of his whole 
lifetime, we can see clearly the dominant need which 


156 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


is at work. It is his need to escape from his former 
state of helplessness and to extend his dominion over 
the world. His main method in this progressive con- 
quest is imitation, and we may, perhaps, best consider 
here this important feature of behavior. 

There is no necessity to invoke a special instinct 
for imitation. The connection between hearing a 
word, not as a mere noise, but as an articulate sound, 
and pronouncing it is very close. The nervous 
centers concerned are in intimate connection. When- 
ever the child utters a word, he immediately hears 
it, and, as we have suggested, it is doubtful whether 
the young infant makes any distinction between them. 
The closeness of this connection is shown also by 
the extraordinary precocity of some children in sing- 
ing. Erwin Nyiregyhazi, for example, began to 
imitate singing before he was one year old, and could 
correctly reproduce melodies before he could speak." 
The same is reported of Handel. That the percep- 
tion should be the key to the movements required to 
reproduce it and that the reproduction should often 
take place as a kind of completion of the whole 
process is not more mysterious than anything else 
that we do. At a later stage deliberate imitation 
arises, due to a conscious desire to repeat what has 
been done by others. This plays an essential part 
in the learning of speech and in most of the child’s 
other acquisitions. 

The Dominion of Society. It will be evident that 
the acquisition of language is not only an extension 


*G. Révész, The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy, p. 7. 


MAN’S LINGUISTIC HERITAGE 157 


of the child’s dominion over the world, but also an 
extension of society’s dominion over him. He 1s 
forced thereby into closer conformity with already 
established ways of regarding the world, not only 
because the wishes of adults can now take a more 
intimate hold upon him, but because automatically 
his mind takes over the traditional naming patterns. 

Man’s dependence upon tradition and upon his 
membership of a society has led some psychologists 
to conceive of society as a power or force outside of 
man. If we pay sufficient attention to the ways in 
which parents and elders influence the child, through 
language and otherwise, and to the ways in which 
men influence one another, there is no occasion for 
such vague speculations. Group or social psychology 
is the psychology of men in groups or societies. 
Change a man’s group and you change him, but a 
great deal of confusion reigns among psychologists 
upon this point. It is a common practice to write 
of the ‘group mind’ as though this were something 
analogous to the individual mind. But we should 
be clear that it is merely a handy term for a system 
of individual minds in more or less close interaction. 
To conceive of it as a ‘super-soul,’ floating outside 
all the individual minds of the members of the group, 
is a concession to mental laziness. At present the 
large and important French school of sociologists 
led by Durkheim is especially prone to this tempta- 
tion. 

The Virtues and Drawbacks of Language. We may 
regard our linguistic heritage both as an immense 


158 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


advantage and, on a smaller scale, as a calamity. 
When we consider how impotent any single mind 
would be to make for itself a picture of reality one 
thousandth part as adequate as that to which language 
leads us, we see the advantages. The discoverer of 
the auxiliary verb, of the preposition, and of the 
definite article should have their portraits, could they 
be painted, in every school. Needless to say, no such 
heroes ever existed; these mighty instruments arose 
much as our hands gradually became free for general 
purposes. Yet there is another side to this endow- 
ment. At many points language badly misrepresents 
the world as we know it. All current languages 
embody in their grammar and vocabulary an outlook 
upon the world which is passing away. The fact 
that we are forced to use nouns for what are essen- 
tially happenings rather than things (as when we 
say ‘an emotion,’ ‘a perception,’ ‘a thought,’ instead 
of an emotional, a perceptual or a ratiocinative 
event), isan example. The struggle which psychol- 
ogy is having now to rid itself of a false ‘atomism? 
and to arrive at ‘dynamic’ conceptions is primarily a 
struggle against a bad legacy in language. Innumer- 
able other examples could be given. 

But language has still other drawbacks than this of 
smuggling inappropriate ideas into our minds while 
we are too young to protect ourselves. It is the 
vehicle of tradition in more than intellectual matters. 
Far too many of our moral attitudes come to us 
unscrutinized and without proper criticism through 
language alone. Consider those two prodigious 


MAN’S LINGUISTIC HERITAGE 159 


engines of moral discipline, the simple words ‘good? 
and ‘bad.’ Originally to the child they are equiv- 
alent to ‘permitted’ and ‘not-permitted.’ Little by 
little the problem, “By whom permitted?” may be 
faced; but in the end any such coherent interpreta- 
tion of the words usually lapses, the higher reaches 
of the investigation being so obscure, and the mind 
is left simply with attitudes of acceptance and re- 
jection which the words touch off. The individual 
has regressed, in other words, into an infantile or 
animal state; ‘bad’ has become once more merely a 
danger cry and ‘good’ a lure call. Hence when 
anything is generally alleged to be good or to be 
bad, the great majority of people in the great major- 
ity of their moments react without any view as to 
what it is that is being said. This nebulosity is a 
great obstacle in the many cases in which a revalu- 
ation of traditional attitudes is made necessary by 
changed circumstances and increased knowledge. 

Many political watchwords, of which illustrations 
are not needed, are good examples of language which 
has lapsed unobserved into this infantile condition. 
It would not, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that 
half of what passes for current thought on general 
affairs is not thought at all, but language operated at 
a merely emotional level. 

There need be nothing surprising in this. Apart 
from his technical pursuits, his hunting, his building, 
etc., we have seen that primitive man’s outlook is 
not governed by the facts of nature, but by what we 
regard as superstitious whimsies; and this level of 


160 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


mental activity has only been transcended at com- 
paratively rare moments in human history, for 
example in Assyria under Assurbanipal. We have 
been living on the legacy of these early achievements 
ever since, as the Renaissance shows; and if we have 
carried the task rather further by the advance of 
science during the last three hundred years, this 
should not blind us to the precariousness of our hold 
upon high civilization. Great though the difference 
may be as regards ‘seeing things as they are’ be- 
tween the educated adult and the child or the savage, 
from another point of view it is still too slight. We 
are still human, all-too-human as Nietzsche so in- 
sistently pointed out. 


CHAPTER X: BEHAVIOR 


The Historical Background of Behaviorism. Dur- 
ing the last thirty years academic psychology has re- 
ceived a number of salutary shocks. The greatest of 
these has come from psycho-analysis. Here was a 
body of mixed observations and doctrine set forth by 
doctors who paid practically no attention at all to 
accepted views, who virtually ignored the fact that 
a science calling itself psychology was already in 
existence. The orthodox psychologists for some 
time retaliated by ignoring psycho-analysis. But 
however little of the doctrines of psycho-analysis 
become ultimately accepted, there can be no doubt 
that the shock has been salutary. A striking ex- 
ample is a confession of the late Dr. Rivers, an 
exceptionally active and well-informed psychologist. 
Just before the War he helped to draw up a syllabus 
for a course in psychological medicine. When he 
came to revise it just after the War he discovered 
to his astonishment that it included no mention of 
Instinct.t This change of view among orthodox 
psychologists was due more to the labors of Freud 
than to anything else. 

But to-day the conception of instinct is itself being 
challenged by none more vigorously than by Watson 
and the Behaviorists whose work and views have 
given a fresh shock—more particularly to American 


*w. H.R. Rivers, Psychology and Politics, p. 4. 
tI 


162 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


psychology. Other countries have hitherto paid re- 
markably little attention, which at first sight is odd 
since American work in this field is for the most Be 
closely followed. 

One possible explanation of this neglect is that in 
Europe sides have already often been taken on what 
is regarded as in part a religious issue.’ 

The Nature of Observation. The doctrine of Be- 
haviorism can be summed up briefly in two state- 
ments: (1) That psychology deals only with what 
can be observed. (2) That ‘consciousness’ is a mean- 
ingless term. It is worth while to consider each of 
these statements closely. 

When the behaviorist speaks of observation he 
means something which can be done by a photo- 
graphic film or a spring balance just as well as by a 
human being. What is observed is one event, the 
observation of it is another; and what happens is 
merely that the observed event under suitable con- 
ditions is accompanied by the observing event—which 
varies with it. Thus an observation is seni one 
form of what is called a ‘causal sequence’* and any 
event succeeding and varying with another might, 
on a behaviorist account, be said to observe it. But 
the particular observations with which the behaviorist 

*Cf. the controversies arising out of the doctrines of Hobbes, 
La Mettrie, Condillac, Bentham, Comte, and G. H. Lewes, for ex- 
ample, as dealt with in Lange’s monumental work, The History of 
Materialism. 

*For a clear discussion of modern views of causation Bertrand 


Russell’s The A B C of Relativity, (1925) pp. 103-205 may be very 
profitably consulted. 


BEHAVIOR 163 


is concerned are events in people, in human observers, 
which follow other events in other people or in them- 
selves. Now it would appear at first sight that 
events in people and in ourselves could be divided 
into two kinds: those which are conscious, or are 
accompanied by consciousness—as when we hear a 
noise, have a tooth out, are frightened, lift a heavy 
weight or deliberately choose between actions; and 
those which are not conscious, not accompanied by 
consciousness—as when by a series of muscular con- 
tractions we pass food through the stomach, when 
we balance ourselves, dilate the pupil, or perform 
a habitual involuntary gesture. This difference 
which has nearly always been considered very strik- 
ing, unmistakable, and fundamental, is denied by 
strict behaviorists. And this denial is the novel point 
in their doctrine. 

The grounds for it are simple, as simple as the 
denial itself. If we observe some one else, Watson 
points out, the only difference that we can detect 
between what he would claim as a conscious event 
in him and an unconscious event is that the activities 
in his muscles and glands and the happenings in his 
nervous system which accompany them are different 
in the two cases. We never observe any of this con- 
sciousness he speaks of; all we observe is changes in 
his behavior, including the vocal movements by 
which he speaks of it to us, and if he observes us he 
will never observe any consciousness in us. This is 
very true and the contrary view has never been held. 
But Watson concludes that consciousness is “a plain 


164 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


assumption just as unprovable, just as unapproach- 
able, as the old concept of the soul” (Behaviorism, 
p. 5). 

Self-observation. Compare now the case in which 
we observe ourselves. Let us stand before a mirror 
and, not to choose too violent an experiment, let us 
gently tweak a tuft of hair. No more than before 
do we observe any consciousness in the movements 
which we see, either in the tweaks or in the facial 
contractions which may follow if they grow more 
vigorous. None the less, another series of changes 
is certainly taking place. Each tension of the skin 
is accompanied by these changes, as is each movement 
of the arm, and about these changes we are even 
more sure than about our actual movements. The 
problem, however, is whether these changes are 
known through observation, in the sense defined 
above. 

If they are, we must admit that we do not yet 
know which events, by varying with which others, 
are ‘observing’ them. It is possible that conscious 
events only become conscious through causing other 
events which thus observe them—just as Watson’s 
reactions observe an infant’s reactions to 2 mouse— 
but by an inner observation. We do not yet know 
enough about the working of the brain to be certain 
that this does not happen. Yet it seems improb- 
able that consciousness is a matter of observation in 
this sense. Conscious events certainly observe other 
events and are observed by them, i.e., they have 


BEHAVIOR 165 


causes and effects, but it must be doubted whether 
this being observed has anything to do with their 
consciousness. 

The first half of Behaviorism then, the contention 
that psychology deals only with what can be ob- 
served, excludes consciousness from its field of study, 
for we clearly cannot yet systematically observe it 
in this sense. And the behaviorists are left with a 
perfectly definite field for research, namely the ob- 
servable responses which different situations excite 
and the history and interconnections of these situa- 
tions and responses. Much valuable work is being 
done by them in this field. We shall consider some 
of their results later. 

The Status of Consciousness. But the other half 
of Behaviorism is less successful. Fortunately it is 
much less important. ‘That consciousness is a mean- 
ingless term, that it “is neither a definable nor a 
usable concept; that it is merely another word for 
the ‘soul’? of more ancient times” (Behaviorism, 
p- 3), and that it is a pure assumption—all this does 
not follow from its non-observable nature. We 
do not observe consciousness; we have it or are it, 
and in fact most of our observations of other things 
require it. In this respect the point of view of the 
behaviorist is not a point of view, but a mistake. 

Yet this denial is plainly not due merely to a 
blunder;* it springs from much more interesting 


* Logical muddles certainly do seem to haunt behavioristic litera- 
ture. On this point Roback may be quoted: “So inured are we 


166 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


sources. There is, in fact, something very unsatis- 
factory about introspection as a scientific method. 
It often produces conflicting evidence which is 
difficult to criticize, and it requires a technique which 
is not strictly analogous to the other techniques of 
science. In physics or in physiology any able man 
can be trained to be a moderately good investigator 
and any failings he may have (inaccuracy or clumsi- 
ness, for example) are easily detected. But in 
introspection the causes of discrepancies and the kind 
of training required to produce improvement are still 
very uncertain.” Thus men impatient of the slow 
task of clarifying problems, who like to see their 
work clear ahead of them in the form of definite 
questions to be answered by a definite technique, 
readily tend to despise introspection. This impa- 
tience rather than bad arguments is responsible for 
the negative side of Behaviorism. There is also the 
feeling that any adding in of ‘conscious’ factors 
which cannot be measured and do not obey the same 
laws as the rest of nature must play havoc with all 
becoming to the sight of flagrant logical blunders that ludicrous 
Statements are given a resemblance of significance and are treated in 
all seriousness. Thus if it be true that Watson ‘from introspection 

. insists that consciousness has no existence in man or in animals,’ 
as we are told by Pillsbury, we should put him into the class of the 
brilliant individual who dreamt he was wide awake, which gave 
him such a shock that he woke up very briskly only to find himself 
sound asleep” (A. A. Roback, Behaviorism and Psychology, p. 8). 
The italics are ours. 

* Cf. MacCurdy, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 59: “We all of 
us introspect to the advantage of our pet theories . . . the most 


valid material is to be derived from the experience of those who 
are not trained introspectionists.” 


BEHAVIOR 167 


hopes of satisfactory explanations; and this feeling 
is justified. An essentially physiological explanation 
ought not to be eked out by scraps of experience. 
It should remain physiology. But this is not—and 
here the Behaviorists made their mistake—the same 
thing as saying that there can be no study of con- 
sciousness or that the study may not provide valuable 
indications in working out a physiological theory of 
behavior. In point of fact, it constantly so serves. 
What is valid in the doctrine is the insistence upon 
external observation of behavior, as an indispensable 
method in psychology. But this is hardly an innova- 
tion. The more novel point is the demand that this 
behavior should be conceived in terms of itself and 
that we should exclude from our interpretations of 
it any but a limited number of physiological ideas. 
This self-imposed limitation need not be, but is, com- 
monly confused by the behaviorist with the quite 
different point of the occurrence of consciousness. 
It is one thing to say: “Let us try to describe and 
explain all human behavior entirely in terms of inter- 
action between stimulus-situation and response,” and 
quite another to say, “Let us try to persuade people 
that they have no consciousness.” The first is of 
real value, and likely, if it can be carried rather 
further, to change our views on many points, and 
possibly to bring out the rdle of consciousness in a 
new light. The second is merely waste of time. 
The Methods of Behaviorism. The methods and 
conceptions so far developed by Behaviorism are 
extremely simple. They derive very largely from 


168 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Pavlov’s conditioned reflex methods which we have 
described in Chapter III. But in man stimuli often 
become conditioned after only one occurrence. And 
the situations in which human behavior takes place 
consist of uncountable numbers of different stimuli. 
Moreover, man’s adjustment involves multitudes of 
responses, and the problem of strictly tracing out 
the process by which response depends upon situa- 
tion is overwhelmingly complex. Even in Pavlov’s 
laboratory, when the dog, a simpler animal, is 
shielded during the experiment in every possible 
way—-sitting on a table in a dark sound-proof room 
entirely separated from the experimenter who sees 
him only through a periscope and gives him the 
stimuli and measures his responses by indirect elec- 
trical means—it is still often difficult to get trust- 
worthy results; a fly, for example, which was 
fluttering in a corner of the dark chamber quite away 
from the dog was found on one occasion to be 
upsetting the whole experiment. When the experi- 
menter 1s not separated from the dog, accidents in 
his manner quite beyond his control play a hopelessly 
disturbing part in producing the responses obtained. 

It is not very surprising, then, that the experiments 
of behaviorists with human beings in a more or less 
ordinary mixed environment should seem in com- 
parison crude and their results doubtful. The 
conditions are a little better with infants, and it is 
here that the best work has been done. It was work 
which very badly needed doing, since the behavior 


BEHAVIOR 169 


of the very young has been for fairly obvious reasons 
much neglected. 

The Origins of Fear. One of Watson’s most inter- 
esting observations was that the peculiar and recog- 
nizable response which is ordinarily known as fear, 
“4 jump, a start, a respiratory pause followed by 
more rapid breathing with marked vasomotor 
changes” (changes in the blood flow, e.g. growing 
pale), sudden closure of the eye, clutching of hands, 
puckering of lips, is only elicited in ‘new-borns’ by 
two kinds of stimuli, loud noises, and being suddenly 
left without support. But as is well known, a normal 
three-year-old shows fear for a great number of 
other things. Here is a representative list from 
Watson: darkness, and all rabbits, rats, dogs, fish, 
frogs, insects, and mechanical animal toys. Watson’s 
thesis is that all these fears arise because at some 
time the appearance of a dog, for example, has co- 
incided with either a loud noise or being knocked 
over (loss of support). The dog later, when it 
merely approaches causes the fear, just as the note 
caused Pavlov’s dog’s mouth to water. This fear 
then gets transferred to other situations which the 
infant groups with it,’ and so on. Evidently this 
view has no use for ‘instincts’ except in the sense of 
initial characteristic responses to characteristic situa- 
tions. But these, as Watson points out, are shown 


* Thus Albert B., eleven months old, who had an (experimentally) 
conditioned fear of a white rat, showed fear five days later of a 
rabbit, 5 dog, a fur coat, cotton wool, but not of bricks (Behaviorism, 
p. 128). 


170 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


by a boomerang, which when properly thrown be- 
haves quite unlike an ordinary stick. The child 
would be a very complicated kind of boomerang, 
and its instincts merely the result of its structure at 
birth. 

Now this, it will be realized, is, if it is correct, an 
extremely important contribution. Watson finds in 
children who have not been emotionally conditioned 
no such fears of dogs or darkness, and if this is 
established, a prospect of a comparatively fearless 
humanity is opened up if only we can manage our 
nurseries aright. There is, however, the possibility 
that maturation may introduce complications. Even 
though loud noises and loss of support be the only 
stimuli which cause fear immediately after birth, it 
may be the case that later on other stimuli come to 
have the same effect merely through the infant’s 
growth. Maturation certainly plays some part, and 
some very definite responses only appear at a very 
late age. The specific sexual responses appearing 
with adolescence are an obvious instance. 

The Unconditioned Emotions. The exact truth in 
this matter will only be discovered by further experi- 
mental research and Watson is undoubtedly to be 
congratulated for the part he has played in further- 
ing such experimentation. He has come to consider 
that the unlearned (unconditioned) beginnings of 
emotional reactions are three in number. Fear, 
elicited as above, Rage, elicited by hampering of 
bodily movements, and Love, elicited by stroking of 


BEHAVIOR I7I 


the skin, tickling, gentle rocking, and patting. Love 
responses include “those popularly called ‘affec- 
tionate,’ ‘good-natured,’ ‘kindly,’ . . . as well as the 
responses we see in adults between the sexes. They 
all have a common origin” (Behaviorism, p. 123). 

Watson further points out that since the same 
object (say a parent) may in one situation become a 
conditionad stimulus for fear, in another for rage 
and in another for love, these three original groups 
of responses can easily become complicated through 
experience. Only, he does not use the word ‘ex- 
perience.’ To do so would be to link his labors up 
with those of more traditional psychologists. His 
extremely provoking attitude towards academic psy- 
chologists and towards psycho-analysts alike, amus- 
ing and inspiriting though it is when we realize 
that his work is likely to be of great assistance to 
them and is not in conflict with theirs, is to be 
regretted if it debars them, as it may, from taking 
due notice and advantage of it. They have already 
shown too often the natural tendency to reply in 
kind. It may be suggested that these very different 
views and methods are not irreconcilable. Nothing 
so readily gives a beginner in psychology a sense of 
helplessness and annoyance as the existence of 
violently opposed views which he more often than 
not suspects to be mere verbal variants. And indeed 
Watson’s ‘boomerang’ analogy shows that he is not 
far removed from the position of Koffka as regards 
instinct (The Growth of the Mind, p. 106), while 


I72 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


his account of the conditioning of the love-emotion 
brings him very near to the important group of 
psycho-analysts represented by Kempf and Frinck. 
The fundamental divisions among psychologists are 
often less serious than they appear. 


CHAPTER XI: LOOKING INWARDS 


Bouvarp and Pécuchét in the great novel by 
Flaubert resolved to take up psychology. The goal 
of psychology, they read, is to study the facts which 
take place “in the bosom of the self”; these are dis- 
covered by introspection. ‘And for a fortnight, after 
breakfast regularly, they hunted about at random in 
their minds, hoping to make notable discoveries, and 
made none and were much surprised.” 

The Elusiveness of Consciousness. They had rea- 
son to be surprised, for it is indeed odd that intro- 
spection tells us so little. If the old metaphysical 
view, that the known and the knower must be alike, 
were sound, our own minds should be the most 
certain objects of our knowledge. Yet they are 
to-day perhaps the least certain. The most mysteri- 
ous thing in the universe to man is at present himself, 
his own mind and its nature. It has not always 
been so. In the ages of faith, the Dark Ages, as 
the historians have called them, the outside world 
seemed much more mysterious than man. Thus he 
tried to explain it in terms of himself. He either 
made it a stage on which the drama of his own life 
was enacted, a thing with no further interest of its 
own, or he pictured it as being animated and guided 
somewhat after the fashion of himself. The balance 
has changed since then. Nowadays his tendency is 

173 


174 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


to conceive himself as far as possible in terms of his 
knowledge of the outer world. 

It is curious to reflect that the things which man 
best understands are on the whole the things which 
least concern him. He can predict the movements 
of the planets, but not the weather, he has fathomed 
the deep sea, but cannot measure his own desires, 
he knows more about beer than about his blood . . . 
and at the heart of all his knowledge is a mystery, 
namely how he gets it. This last problem we shall 
discuss later. Here we have a simpler task, to 
describe from within what conscious life is like, basing 
our account upon the facts which are always acces- 
sible to everyone. 

The reason why Bouvard and Pécuchét made no 
discoveries was that they asked no definite questions. 
It is only by iterrogating consciousness that we get 
any light upon it. It will be well to begin by draw- 
ing up a list of the principal questions we propose 
to raise in the order in which we shall raise them: 


(1). What is the Self? 

(2) Where is experience located? 

(3) What kind of a thing is an experience? 

(4) What are the essential aspects of experience? 


The answers to these questions must inevitably 
be tentative. The value of studying them lies not 
in the answers which we obtain, but in the insight 
into our nature which results from the inquiry. 

The Distorting Influence of Language. Through- 
out this undertaking we must beware of three allied 


LOOKING INWARDS 175 


dangers. In the first place, language was not 
developed with a view to this account. Not only 
is there a bad shortage of words for the task, but 
such words as we are compelled to use are ill fitted 
to it, and distort the account unless we watch them 
closely and do not take them too much at their face 
value. Language was developed to describe (at the 
common-sense level) what we see or hear, not to 
describe seeing or hearing. It is a distorting influence 
here not only as a vocabulary, but as a syntax. For 
example, it is natural to say ‘I have a thought.’ But 
that suggests a fact analogous to ‘I have a penny,’ 
whereas what it really stands for would be better 
put by saying “A thinking is happening in me”; but 
even here ‘in’? and ‘me’ are misleading. And when 
we talk of ‘ideas,’ ‘sensations,’ or ‘pleasures’ the case, 
as we shall see, is worse still. Language, in fact, is 
not only a means by which we hide our thoughts 
from other people; it is a veil which helps to hide 
our own lives from ourselves. 

Hypotheses and Abstractions. The second danger 
is no less insidious. It comes from the great difh- 
culty of distinguishing here between our hypotheses 
and the facts these hypotheses were introduced to 
explain. The Self, strange as it may appear, 1s such 
an hypothesis, so are, more evidently, the Will, the 
Memory, the Intelligence, the Instincts, and the 
Unconscious. And in fact most of the terms of 
psychology stand for hypotheses, not for facts. The 
facts are there all the while, they make up our 
lives, but it is impossible to weave them together into 


176 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


any intelligible system without some hypotheses. 
The trouble is that we easily mistake the hypotheses 
for the facts. When we reflect upon our experience 
they tend to come between us and the facts. Thus 
many accounts of introspection given by psycholo- 
gists seem to a naive reader to have nothing to do 
with anything he knows about; which is an absurd 
result. This is one of Bergson’s most effective con- 
tentions; but, alas! it must be added that Bergson’s 
own hypotheses are just as misleading on many 
points as the traditional ones. 

The third danger is one on which Bergson has 
also insisted. When we analyze an experience theo- 
retically we often find it convenient to suppose it built 
up out of certain elements in certain combinations. 
For example, much psychology has proceeded suc- 
cessfully on the assumption that sensations are the 
basic elements out of which all experience is com- 
pounded. An amazing amount of detailed informa- 
tion about our perception of nature has been achieved 
by the aid of this assumption. So that it comes as 
a shock to be forced to ask: “Do we ever have 
sensations?” None the less this question must not 
only be asked but be decided in the negative. We 
do not have sensations; they don’t occur. They are 
products of abstraction. We shall see later, and in 
Chapter XII what this denial amounts to. 

The Conscious Subject or Self. With these dangers 
in view we may proceed. What is the first obvious 
and overwhelming fact about our ordinary experi- 
ence? It is that it seems to belong to us, to be the 


LOOKING INWARDS 177 


experience of a self. We do not find isolated bits 
of experience belonging to nobody. All experience 
seems to be attached to, to be part of, a system of 
experiences which we call a person or say belongs to 
a person. In fact, it is impossible to describe a 
complete concrete bit of experience without bringing 
in either a proper name or a personal pronoun. We 
find experience always organized into personal 
histories. 

But let us not be too hasty. Is this really a fact 
or is it an hypothesis? Have we merely recorded 
what we find or have we added an interpretation, an 
assumption, in giving our account? If we look closely 
we shall discover an assumption, namely that there 
is something to be called a self, or person. How far 
is it well grounded? 

First, a point about which there can be no doubt 
whatever. Experience is systematic; any moment of 
our normal lives has a peculiar systematic structure 
which is what we are pointing out when we say that 
it is our experience, or belongs to us. There may be 
certain exceptions, but if so they are abnormal and 
probably pathological. Certain occurrences in medi- 
umistic trances suggest that it may be possible 
for detached fragments of experience to occur,’ but 
these we need not here consider. 

The main fact is clear; any moment of your life 
is ‘yours in some very important sense, and, further, 
any two moments of your life are linked together 
in a peculiar way, through both belonging to you. 


* Cf. C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, p. 541. 


178 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


By what hypothesis can we explain this cardinal fact. 
What, in other words, are you? 

A traditional answer has been that there is some- 
thing highly indescribable which persists throughout 
your whole history and is essentially you. Your 
experiences are either modifications of this some- 
thing, as the varied-colored lights shining through 
a pane of glass might be regarded as modifications 
of the glass, or else they are either states of some- 
thing else (e.g., your body or your empirical ego) 
or trains of facts, which you, the indescribable some- 
thing, the transcendental ego, apprehend. It is plain 
that this view, the simple ‘Soul’ view, can take vari- 
ous forms. It is on the whole less prominent in 
recent psychology than ever before. Its merit is 
simplicity; its chief demerit is that it is so difficult 
to see what evidence, other than Psychical Research, 
could possibly either overthrow it or establish it. 
It hangs in the air out of reach of investigation, and 
it is almost a duty for man in the present crisis of 
his career to prefer views which run the risk of 
refutation, since all his recent advances have come 
through damage done to cherished convictions. It 
is hard to admit that the beliefs we most cling to are 
usually in the long run the most dangerous. Let us 
see what other more risky views have been suggested. 

We can obviously, if we please, put the body in 
the place of the soul, and say that an experience is 
yours because it is a happening in your body. This, 
as the view most exposed to danger, is perhaps the 
most to be recommended. We have discussed its other 


LOOKING INWARDS 179 


merits on a former page (Chapter II). But for our 
present purposes, the description not the explanation 
of our experience, this hypothesis is of importance 
only in one respect. We see which this is if we ask, 
Where does our experience seem to take place? 

The Localization of Experience. Plainly for the 
most part in the head, though not exclusively. Nearly 
all thought of absent things or about abstract topics 
(some people with very vivid imagery are excep- 
tions) seems to happen in the head. But emotions 
often seem to occupy large tracts of the body; a 
longing for company can sometimes be as definitely 
located in the stomach as a hunger. Feelings of 
touch normally seem to be at or near the point 
touched on the surface of the skin, though a dif- 
ferent state of affairs can arise. For example, when 
a nerve which has been cut is regenerated, the out- 
growing processes of the neurones may wander into 
quite different regions from those which knew them 
before. When this happens a touch, e.g., on the 
thigh may be felt as a touch on the heel. What are 
known as referred pains are also curious examples. 
An affection of the liver may give rise to pain 
in the neck, and the pain of angina pectoris may 
first be felt in the left little finger. In these cases 
the intervention of reflexes is responsible for the 
illusion. 

But, in general, experiences due to stimuli arising 
within the body are felt very nearly where they occur. 
It is different with what are known as the distance 
receptors—the eye and ear, for example. We locate 


180 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


the butterfly, whose flight we are following, out in 
the air, not in the eye, and very rightly. But where 
do we locate the seeing of it? Probably the answer 
should be—nowhere. Sometimes, when the eye is 
tired, we may think we feel the seeing in the eye. 
But with discrimination we discern that what we 
are feeling there is not strictly visual, but muscular, 
a strain in the eye muscles. If we compare the 
sight of the butterfly with the best image we can 
form of it with closed eyes the difference as to 
location of the two experiences is usually very 
marked, though individuals differ and differ from 
day to day. A moderate visualizer has a sense of 
activity with a definite orientation going on inside his 
skull and filling up most of its cavity which is quite 
absent in ordinary vision, for which it would plainly 
be a disadvantage. Whereas the apparent direction 
of imaginings inside the skull is a decided gain. 
Compare visualizing a monkey before you and be- 
hind, a bird in the sky and a beetle in the ground; 
a sense of strain in one direction or another is with 
most people an important part of the experience. 
We shall see later (Chapter XII) that movements 
of the eyes have much to do with this. 

On the whole, then, experiences tend to be located 
roughly in the regions in which their neural counter- 
parts occur, and when this is not the case good reasons 
can be found for the anomaly. And to this extent 
the hypothesis that the self, to which an experience 
belongs and which binds together the divers experi- 


LOOKING INWARDS 18t 


ences of one history, is the body, is useful in describ- 
ing experience. 

The Self as a Mnemic Bundle. It has been sug- 
gested that it is unnecessary to suppose any one 
persistent thing whose states would be the experience 
of one person; that the total collection of these states 
would be itself sufficient. Memory might be the 
bond which united my experiences into one self and 
yours into a different self. My experiences are only 
revived in me, never in you. Every one of my 
experiences is dependent upon my past experience; 
it involves, as we have seen, a partial repetition of 
past experience; and, again, it arises in a setting of 
just previous experience of mine: it is either a con- 
tinuation or a contrast to what has just been happen- 
ing. It overlaps an experience which overlaps 
another, and so on. Experience, in other words, is 
sensibly continuous. The most sudden changes in 
it are at least changes. We do not have first one 
experience and then a totally new and different one. 
The new experience grows out of the old, and if we 
look closely we shall find them to have much in 
common. We are not like a single thread on which 
separate juxtaposed pearls of experience are strung. 
Our consciousness is an affair of many strands. A 
loud noise may seem to interrupt the whole stream 
of our thought, but if we look more closely we shall 
find, bridging the gulf between the two experiences, 
a swarm of undisturbed accompaniments. The feel 
of our feet thrusting against the ground, the con- 
tinuous interplay of the poises of our body, the 


182 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


tensions and relaxations of our breathing, our other 
organic rhythms, numberless ordinarily unnoticed 
mental happenings contribute to supply a blended 
background to consciousness. This ‘field of marginal 
attention,’ this background of consciousness, has also 
been supposed by some * to be the self. It stands 
over against the interesting item of consciousness, 
the item which in some way has to be coped with; 
it is the subject that is aware of and concerned with 
this item as its correlative object. 

This type of view is to be distinguished from the 
traditional view, the view which language favors. 
On that view experience is something which some- 
thing else, not an experience at all, but an experient, 
has, enjoys, contemplates, or undergoes. On this 
view, there is only the experience; the apparent 
cleavage between experient and experience is due 
merely to unequal stability in the components of the 
total field of experience. The parts which, as we 
say, “need attention,” the less stable parts about 
which something should be done, appear as objects, 
the rest play the part of an apparent self or subject. 

The Dynamic View of the Mind. The reader need 
not resent this view as an attempt to dissolve him 
into thin air. All his observable characteristics re- 
main as before. It is merely another way of describ- 
ing the same facts. Most objections to it, however, 
probably derive from its seeming less favorable to a 
belief in survival of death than the more traditional 
view. Whether there is a self and what it is cannot 


*Cf. H. R. Marshall, Consciousness, p. 535. 


LOOKING INWARDS 183 


yet be decided, but it is possible to be rather more 
definite with regard to our third main question. 
What kind of a thing is an experience in general? 
It has become clear that experience is dynamic, not 
static; it is a stream of events, not merely a series 
of states. We can put this in another way. The 
mind is not a thing, but an activity. 

We are so accustomed to thinking in terms of 
things like bricks, loaves, boots, atoms, and electrons, 
which, if they change at all, do so in such crude 
fashions and affect one another in such simple ways, 
that to conceive of experience as a system of energies 
whose changes bear very little analogy to the changes 
in such ‘material objects’ is difficult. Those possess- 
ing some slight acquaintance with, for example, 
elementary electrical theory will have an advantage 
here. For they will be less exposed to the danger 
of conceiving the matter too crudely. 

A vocabulary of ‘tensions,’ ‘stresses,’ ‘impulses,’ 
‘currents,’ ‘tendencies,’ and ‘flows’ is far more ade- 
quate in describing experiences than one of ‘sensa- 
tion,’ ‘percepts,’ ‘ideas,’ ‘concepts,’ and ‘images.’ 
This is what the assertion that experience is dynamic, 
that the mind is an activity, amounts to. These 
traditional psychological terms are in fact a serious 
obstacle to a real understanding. They suggest too 
much that consciousness is a kind of shop window 
containing these various items in various arrange- 
ments with a mysterious factory in the background 
turning out the products displayed. But these 
images, ideas, etc., are not products, but processes. 


184 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


What we observe when we introspect is the work- 
ing of the factory itself. An image or an idea 1s 
a change, a redistribution of energies. Hence the 
peculiar fluidity of consciousness passing away from 
us always like a stream. And if we think of our 
experiences as like waves or eddies rather than like 
the flowing water or bits of stick passing down the 
stream, we shall come nearer to an adequate con- 
ception. 

Disturbance and Recovery of Equilibrium. One 
further general character of experience must be noted 
before we go on to consider it in more detail. This 
concerns the way, in general, that these changes come 
about. We have already hinted that an experience 
only becomes an object for consciousness if it needs 
in some way to be dealt with. And we may take the 
subject to be the rest of the mind, which is called 
upon to deal with it. The important point here, 
important on any view of the self, is that experience 
is initiated through the need of the mind to deal 
with a situation—that is, to make a new adaption. 
Our everyday psychological language is full of 
phrases suggesting the importance of this fact. ‘To 
attend to’ something means ordinarily to try to put it 
right, or to put ourselves right with regard to it. 
To ‘be concerned with’ has a similar sense, and so has 
to ‘be interested in’ (literally, to interest is to make 
a difference). 

If we ask ourselves why on any occasion we are 
having one kind of experience rather than another 
we find that it is because in this experience we are 


LOOKING INWARDS 185 


dealing with a situation, setting ourselves right with 
regard to it or setting it right with regard to us, or 
attempting to do so. This is true whether we take 
extensive and lengthy experiences (a courtship or 
legal action, for example) or brief and restricted 
experiences (a moment of introspection). In every 
case what is happening is essentially an attempt to 
restore equilibrium to a system of activities which has 
been disturbed. The disturbance may come from 
without, it may be due to a smell of burning which 
disturbs our equanimity as regards the safety of our 
dwelling. We sniff, set down our glass, get up, and 
take whatever steps we can think of to make sure 
all is well. Only thereby can the system of impulses 
which has been disturbed come to rest* again. Only 
so do we become, as we say, at ease again. Or the 
disturbance may come from within: we remember 
suddenly that we have not posted a letter, and the 
uneasy feeling that ensues drives us out to do so. 

Let us take a more intricate situation. Why does 
anyone study psychology? There may be a thousand 
different reasons in different cases, but all these 
reasons, these motives, will be found to be dis- 
turbances, direct or indirect, of ways in which we 
have adjusted ourselves to our world. Let us con- 
sider two possible cases. A man may take up psy- 
chology for a very direct reason, namely because he 
becomes curious about the mind. He wonders what 
it is and how it works. Language and current ideas 


* Not in the sense that nothing is happening, but that the happen- 
ings are not changing. 


186 THE MEANING GF PSYCHOLOGY 


provide a means of dealing with questions about 
the mind which most people somehow find sufficient ; 
if this man is curious it is because these current ways 
of handling the matter do not satisfy him, they do 
not enable him to meet the situation as it is to him, 
he is out of adjustment, and his curiosity and ques- 
tionings are his attempts to gain a new adjustment. 
Every question is in fact what it feels like, a step 
on a path towards a state of affairs in which adjust- 
ment relieves tension. The path followed may or 
may not lead there. 

But his reasons may be more complicated. He 
may be taking up psychology not out of any interest 
in the subject, but because it is scheduled as part of a 
course leading to a degree, and he may not desire 
the degree itself, but only wish to satisfy a parent 
or trustee who expects him to take it. This is per- 
haps a more typical instance than the last. His 
attitude towards his trustee, a very powerful group 
of interests, has acquired a certain adjustment which 
in turn involves a subordinate group, his degree- 
getting activities, and these in turn require a new 
group of impulses to be formed and ordered, those 
which will enable him to satisfy his examiners in 
psychology. Now every check in the formation of 
this new group throws the higher systems out of 
order and this can only be set straight again by 
further advance. He is driven on through his study 
of psychology by a series of disturbances of these 
major systems and his advances as a psychologist are 
steps towards the restoration of order in them. 


LOOKING INWARDS 187 


This, of course, is a simplified account; other motives, 
of the same kind, however, will come into play. 
Short-circuiting occurs, and as a rule the internal 
equilibrium of the new system coming into being has 
considerable importance. The student will enjoy the 
subject if he understands it as far as he has gone, or 
thinks he does—both are conditions of equilibrium, of 
different order, however. Bewilderment and con- 
fusion, on the other hand, are conditions of disequi- 
librium, states of distress, in other words, and as such 
tend either to cause the student to make further 
efforts or to abandon the subject. 

The Ultimate Modes of Consciousness. In this in- 
stance the threefold distinction which almost all psy- 
chologists have made between knowing, feeling, and 
striving (or cognition, affection, and conation, as they 
call them) can be easily made out. Nearly every 
experience, it has generally been agreed, presents 
these distinct irreducible aspects. It is a knowing 
of, or thinking about, something; it is pleasurable 
or unpleasant; and it is a striving towards something. 
And to consider their relative prominence in dif- 
ferent cases and examine their mutual dependence 
upon one another is the best general method of 
analyzing an experience. We must beware, however, 
of the temptation to regard them as separable. Any 
one of them may lapse so as to be hardly, if at all, 
present, and there are perhaps states of mind in 
which they are not distinguishable; but we do not 
find processes which are purely cognitive, purely 
affective, or purely conative, any more than we find 


188 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


moving bodies which have no mass, or lines in nature 
which have no breadth. When the psychologist says 
that they are irreducible he means that none of 
them can be described in terms of the others. We 
must guard ourselves also against thinking of them 
only in their most highly developed forms. For 
example, we can be thinking of something even when 
we cannot say what it is we are thinking of. Or- 
dinarily our awareness (thinking) is of this or that 
—a toothache, a sonata, space-time—but sometimes, 
as when we are just going to sleep, we may merely 
have a vague awareness of what not. Similarly with 
low degrees of pleasure and unpleasure. And there 
are relatively inert experiences in which we seem 
merely passive, but actually are feebly pursuing a 
course or feebly endeavoring to escape it. 

Striving and Desire. Doubt has often been ex- 
pressed as to whether we are actually conscious of 
striving, whether the fact that we strive is not merely 
an inference from our behavior. What we might 
suppose to be conscious striving, it has been urged, 
is simply awareness of some of the effects of striving. 
When we strive we tend to contract our muscles; 
it may be only the muscles of our jaws or scalp, as 
when we are thinking hard. What we supposed to 
be consciousness of striving would on this view be 
merely awareness of these contractions. Doubtless 
a great deal, which can easily be mistaken for striv- 
ing itself, is really only awareness of these effects 
of striving. But after carefully distinguishing this 
awareness from striving, clear introspective evidence 


LOOKING INWARDS 189 


remains for striving itself as a component of con- 
sciousness. It is most clearly revealed in desire, 
which is striving directed towards an end, an idea 
of which is in consciousness. States of indecision in 
which a conflict of desires leads eventually to decision 
and resolve bring this striving aspect into special 
prominence. We must, however, beware of a com- 
mon confusion here. It is misleading to speak of 
consciousness of striving, because this is equivalent 
to an unawareness of it. We are not ordinarily 
aware of striving; we merely consciously strive. 
Just as to have a feeling is not the same thing as 
to be aware of it (as in introspection), and to be 
aware of being spoken to is not the same thing as 
to be aware (introspectively) of our awareness itself, 
in the same way to strive is not the same thing as to 
be aware of it. We may become aware of it in 
introspection, but it is not an awareness itself, but a 
quite distinct component of consciousness. 

The Unity of the Mind. It is extremely important 
to stress the close organic unity of these three com- 
ponents, because the natural temptation, once they 
have been distinguished, is to treat each of them 
in semi-independence of the others. To put them 
together again is then a difficult matter. In particu- 
lar the separate treatment of cognition (awareness) 
has led to endless trouble. The doctrine of sensa- 
tions and sense-data is a typical product of this tactical 
mistake. If we set aside the striving aspect of con- 
sciousness we easily fall into the trap of supposing 
that influences from the external world impress them- 


190 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


selves somehow, through the sense organs and their 
nervous connections, upon a passive, merely recep- 
tive, ‘mind.’ The dynamic conception recedes in- 
to the background. Vision, for example, becomes 
the mere reception of a multitude of ‘sense-data’ 
which, by dragging up from a mental archive copies 
(images) of other sense-data formerly received, 
arrange themselves into percepts. Such a theory 
(known in the history of psychology as ‘presenta- 
tionism’) is a mythology. Both sense-data and im- 
ages in this use of the word are abstractions, as 
we shall see in the next chapter. For careful intro- 
spection knows nothing of sense-data (except perhaps 
in certain cases of pains and shocks which we shall 
consider in a moment) or of sensations (an older term 
for the same abstracta, abandoned by those who wish 
to make various distinctions between what is sensed 
and the sensing of it). The most simple and rudi- 
mentary awareness is from the beginning perceiving, 
an active process, that is to say, something that we 
do, not something that merely happens to us. 

The importance of this point will be seen if we 
consider how sedulously philosophers have sought 
for data in experience upon which to construct their 
systems. One of the chief results which modern 
psychology has brought out is that this quest is vain, 
if by a datum we mean something simple, un- 
analyzable and ultimate which can safely be used 
as a foundation stone without asking any more about 
it. Experience does not provide such data. The 
simplest of our experiences is a highly complex proc- 


LOOKING INWARDS I9I 


ess; and this result is of fundamental consequence 
for our general speculative outlook on the world. 
To put it shortly, what have for centuries been re- 
garded as the foundations of all our knowledge have 
given way, and no one is any the worse for it. 
Shock. But what exactly is the difference between 
something which we do and something which merely 
happens to us? It is clear enough sometimes to intro- 
spection. Compare the experiences of looking at a 
picture with that of having a tooth drawn, or listen- 
ing to music with being in a boiler factory, or strok- 
ing a kitten with being knocked on the head. The 
difference in these cases is that with the picture, the 
music, and the cat we are responding; our percep- 
tions are steps we take as a result of stimulation, 
steps towards adjustment. If the adjustment is easy 
and smooth, but not so easy as to be automatic and 
stereotyped, we feel pleased: if it is difficult or fails, 
we feel displeasure. The whole conscious experience 
in either case is controlled by the precise condition 
of the new poise towards which we are tending. Con- 
sider the needle of a compass. There is a certain 
position at which the magnetic forces acting upon it 
are in equipoise. If we disturb it, there ensue 
wagelings, steps through which it returns to a posi- 
tion of rest. By a metaphor which is not too strained 
we can say that it is seeking this position. Now 
picture the needle geared up to a motor and driven 
round and round. This roughly represents what 
happens to us in the dentist’s chair, the boiler factory, 
or under the sand-bag of the Apache. Instead of 


I92 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


responding, according to the laws of our own struc- 
ture, to the disturbance which has set us waggling, 
instead of dealing with the situation, the situation is 
dealing with us. 

From this brief indication the reader will be able 
to see how a detailed account would run. The 
essential point is that in perception what happens is 
governed by the end-state of poise towards which 
we are tending, whereas in sensation, on the com- 
paratively rare occasions on which it occurs, all pos- 
sibility of tending to an equipoise is set aside by the 
violent, paralyzing shock of the occurrence. 

But, it will be asked, is not there always a sub- 
stratum of sensation in all perception? Granted that 
the finished perception is a response, is there not a 
purely receptive initial stage, the disturbance, namely, 
which sets the response in action? The reply is that 
this, except in the extreme instances of shock and 
pain, is not conscious, and even in these exceptional 
cases it is very arguable that consciousness entirely 
consists in baffled efforts to cope with the happening. 

The Process of Introspection. Another case in 
which what seem to be sensations are unduly promi- 
nent occurs perhaps in introspection. We ought to 
realize throughout that what happens when we look 
inwards is different from what happens when we are 
not introspecting. Introspection is not simply an 
uncovering, a revealing of our ordinary experiences; 
it is a further and a different experience. What 
seem to be the ‘data’ of introspection do not occur 
at all when we are not looking inwards. In terms of 


LOOKING INWARDS 193 


a dynamic view of the mind, introspection itself is 
the result of a fresh disturbance of equipoise of 
quite a different order from those which govern the 
experiences which we introspect. A diagram of the 
situation (Fig. VIII) may make it clearer. 

The original experience. which is introspected and 
the introspection of it are separate systems of activity, 






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Fic, VIII 


A. THE INTROSPECTED EXPERIENCE B. THE INTROSPECTION 


[Here A is one system of tendencies, figured as a set of compass needles 
being disturbed by a magnet on the left (a stimulus). As they swing 
they disturb one another, but are finding a general state of equipoise. 
When this system is introspected another. system, B, is following in a 
sense A’s changes, but B is also being influenced by a magnet of its own 
on the right (an interest).] 


the second is set in play and controlled in part by the 
first. But not altogether so controlled, for other 
factors, such as the question we are asking and our 
theory of the mind, also intervene. What we get in 
introspection is not Experience A revealed, but Ex- 
perience A as it appears to Experience B. How far 
this is a reliable report of A depends upon how 
reliable it need be in order to satisfy the purpose for 


I94 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


which we are introspecting. Thus the introspections 
which a man makes while grappling with a dangerous 
practical situation, for example those of a cragsman 
deciding whether he has balance enough to round a 
projection, are likely to be very faithful reports of 
his actual present experience. But those of a psy- 
chologist attempting to discover introspective grounds 
for one of his pet theories are not so trustworthy. 
And further we must distinguish our actual introspec- 
tions from our verbal formulations of them—a point 
which psychologists too often forget when comparing 
the introspection reports of different people. 

The Mental Masquerade. There is yet another 
reason for dealing warily with introspective ‘data’ 
whether these are ‘sensations’ or anything else. 
Fvents in the mind hide behind one another. A 
great deal happens that only appears in conscious- 
ness when translated into or disguised as other hap- 
penings. Our visual experience, for example, is so 
much more adequate, rich, and elaborate than our 
touch, our muscular, our kinesthetic experience, that 
these tend to be represented in consciousness by im- 
ages and perceptions of a visual nature. It is only 
when something serious goes wrong with them that 
we can notice how much their absence matters to con- 
sciousness. Similarly, with the very important trib- 
utary of experience which goes by the name of the 
coenesthesia, our general organic sensibility due 
to the state of our body as a whole. It is always 
coloring our consciousness, but to take note of it in 
introspection is extraordinarily difficult. We are 


LOOKING INWARDS 195 


much more likely to describe it as a peculiar peaceful- 
ness or vividness about the landscape or a singular 
glare in the light or stuffiness in the air than to take 
it as what it really is in itself. As Wallon well re- 
marks, “the data of introspection no more correspond 
to our actual psychic processes than they give an 
exact representation of the external world. They 
are only a group of signs, formulz, and convenient 
interpretations for our relations with the whole situ- 
ation.”* These are not reasons for neglecting, much 
less for rejecting, introspection. We have obviously 
nothing to take its peculiar place. But we should 
remember that it does not give either a complete 
report of what is happening or one that must always 
be taken at its face value. 

Pleasure-Unpleasure. Passing now to the pleasure- 
unpleasure aspect, the affective aspect as it is called, 
we may note first how central this seems in all ex- 
perience. What James so finely described as the 
secret solicitancy of pleasure and repugnancy of pain 
often appear to introspection as the mainspring of 
the whole activity. Probably this is largely an illu- 
sion. Pleasure and unpleasure are products of our 
activities rather than their sources. Two questions 
arise for consideration: (1) Do pleasure and un- 
pleasure make up the whole of the effective aspect? 
and (2) What exactly is their—evidently close— 
connection with striving? As to (1) it seems at first 
sight natural to bring emotional characters of ex- 
perience under this heading. Fear, disgust, anger, 





2In Dumas? Traité de Psychologie, vol. i, p. 223. 


196 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


and love may seem at least to contain specific modi- 
fications of consciousness with as good a right to be 
classed among affective phenomena as pleasure or 
unpleasure. But when we look more closely these 
emotional characters turn out to be composite. We 
cannot reduce pleasure and unpleasure either to 
awareness or to striving or to a blend of the two; 
but we can reduce fear to a union of awareness, un- 
pleasure and conscious striving, and its peculiar 
character is given it by what we are aware of, how 
we are striving, and, as a rule, unpleasure. Ghost- 
story fear and other pleasant fears ought strictly 
from the introspective point of view to be called 
by another name. What we know about emotions, 
not through introspection, but from other sources, 
supports this conclusion. They are composite ex- 
periences and get their character from their composi- 
tion. (2) External observations also corroborate 
introspection as regards the second question. Pleas- 
ure and unpleasure are very intimately connected with 
the course of striving, with its progress towards a 
‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory’ stage. Success seems 
always to be pleasant, and failure unpleasant, but 
the success or failure may be local merely, as we 
need hardly point out; and a great success, though 
intensely pleasant, may be from the point of view 
of the whole organism, the whole history of the 
mind, a disaster. So it is with the ecstasies of the 
drug addict. 

How intricate the interplay of pleasure and un- 
pleasure may be is well shown in some introspective 


LOOKING INWARDS 197 


experiments undertaken by Wohlgemuth. Here is 
the report * of one of his subjects, a highly trained 
introspectionist when given a small bottle of helio- 
tropine to sniff: 

“Sensation at first unpleasant. The Unpleasure 
persisted for a brief period at the same intensity. 
Then it increased quite suddenly. A moment later 
I detected a pleasant component in the sensation. 
For a brief period the Pleasure and Unpleasure dis- 
tinctly coexisted. The Unpleasure vanished from 
consciousness rather abruptly and for a short time 
the Pleasure was very considerable. It seemed to 
me of an exciting character which was accompanied 
by fairly widespread organic sensations of a typical 
kind. I noticed particularly a slight catch in the 
breath which occurred at the moment of greatest 
Pleasure. I think the sensations might be described 
as thrilling, or slightly vibratory, in character. I 
think they are similar in kind to those that I have 
sometimes experienced during incipient erotic excita- 
tion. This high degree of pleasure persisted only 
for a very short time. The olfactory sensation it- 
self became then much less pleasant and the organic 
sensations died down. During expiration there was 
some slight discontent at the disappearance of the 
sensation. The absence of the sensation was unin- 
teresting and there was a corresponding pleasure 
at its reappearance. This was quite distinct from the 
sensory pleasure itself.” 


* Pleasure-Unpleasure, 1919, Pp. 55. 


198 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Pains. Pains need a word of elucidation perhaps. 
They are usually unpleasant but not always; and 
some people enjoy playing with a not too sensitive 
tooth. It is best to distinguish them sharply from 
the unpleasure which ordinarily accompanies them 
and to regard them as a special class of perceptions, 
a class which has for obvious biological reasons 
a precedence normally over most other perceptions 
since they arise for the most part from what are 
called nocuous stimuli, stimuli likely to lead to 
damage of the tissues. But as our early example of 
the tree climber and the wasp will show, and as many 
surprising abnormal phenomena show, pain may lose 
this precedence. In hypnotic conditions, even major 
operations can be performed without the patient 
showing any signs of pain, and there is the classic 
story’ of a cheerful and corpulent politician, who in 
an election crisis calmly bit off his damaged finger 
as though it were the most natural thing in the world 
to do. : 

ZEsthetic Experiences. Our general analysis can be 
applied to every kind of experience. A response to 
Shakespeare’s Hamlet differs from a response to 
Wohlgemuth’s Heliotropine only by being a larger 
and much more finely organized unit. Its greater 
value is a consequence of its higher degree of organi- 
zation. Here, as always, our experience is a stream 
of processes tending from an initial arousal or dis- 
turbance to an end-state of rest or acquiescence. A 
situation has arisen, it may be gradually as in Hamlet, 


* Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, p. 33. 


LOOKING INWARDS 199 


which is only met when the various systems aroused 
have found a new equipoise, an end-state in which 
we are readjusted to it. Usually this new poise 
involves many steps—in esthetic experiences they are 
peculiarly elaborate—and the paths followed by the 
numerous impulses which have to be brought into a 
harmony may have to wind round obstacles. What 
we are aware of meanwhile are the factors supplied 
either from without (in perception) or from within 
(in emotion) which guide our response. Our aware- 
ness itself is our response as it develops. Our feel- 
ing, our pleasure or displeasure, is the free or baffled 
flowing of the response. Our hopes, regrets, doubts, 
hesitations are the eddies and backwashes of the 
stream. The states of enjoyment to which the term 
Beauty is probably best restricted show more clearly 
than any others the reconciliation of the most varied 
impulses in a balanced integral experience (syn- 
zesthesis ).* 

The Span of Attention. Usually, in ordinary life, 
we are not a single stream, but a welter of many 
semi-independent streams. We may be adding up 
figures, watching a neighbor, and thinking of what 
we shall do later on in the day simultaneously. 
Several separately disturbed systems are tending in- 
dependently to their end-states. When there is only 
one such process going on we say we are absorbed 


*For an analysis, by the author and others, of the many very 
different uses of the term Beauty and of their psychological basis, 
see The Foundations of Asthetics, second edition, 1925, London and 
New York. 


200 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


by what we are doing. When there are too many 
such separate disturbances or when the settlement 
of one interferes with that of the others we complain 
of distraction. In deep absorption, as is evident from 
the story of the Mysore mathematician who tied a 
cobra round his neck in mistake for a cravat, a change 
in the general situation which would ordinarily cause 
deep disturbance passes apparently unnoticed. What 
happens in such cases is difficult to decide. It is often 
alleged that such changes are always noticed, un- 
consciously. The possibility of sometimes recovering 
them from memory, by hypnosis or other special 
means, as in psycho-analysis, is the evidence for this 
view. It is not very strong evidence, however, for 
we more often never remember them and they have 
no observable effect upon us whatever. What we 
need to make this evidence satisfactory is some 
account of the differences between stimuli that are 
unconsciously noticed and can be recalled by appro- 
priate means, and those that cannot be recalled al- 
though noticed. 

The Limits of Consciousness. What probably hap- 
pens in the majority of cases is that we do consciously 
notice the change, but, since for the moment it has 
no significance for us, we do nothing further about 
it. Thus our response to it is extremely brief and 
does not initiate further disturbances as it would if 
we were attending. For our deeper disturbances are 
always due to prior responses to shallower disturb- 
ances. When we recognize something this recogni- 
tion (itself a response to a disturbance) may, like 


aS oS ee ee 


LOOKING INWARDS 201 


the fuse of a shell, throw much more important 
systems into turmoil. But in deep absorption the 
linkage between our systems of impulses is impaired, 
for all systems save those which are already active. 
In Chapter III we touched upon some possible 
physiological explanations of this fact of inhibition. 

Attention, then, is essentially conscious interest, 
and interest is nothing else than the tendency of a 
disturbed system to regain equipoise. But the width 
of distribution of attention varies greatly in dif- 
ferent experiences. We may have many simul- 
taneous interests or only one single interest, yet the 
single interest may have many ramifications. Often, 
though the dominant interest is single, in other words 
though everything in the experience is implicated in 
the attainment of a single final equipoise which is 
the goal of the experience, the mutual relevance of 
the parts cannot be intellectually worked out. It 
is only shown by their final co-operation. Works of 
art are among the best instances of such experiences. 
Who can say quite how the metrical movement of 
‘Kubla Khan’ is relevant to the sense of the lines? 
Yet it is an integral part of the whole poem, not 
merely appropriate, but essential. 

Interests may be unconscious as well as conscious. 
As to why some are and others are not we know 
as yet very little. Sometimes an interest seems to 
be unconscious because consciousness of it would be 
unpleasant. Yet many unpleasant interests are con- 
scious. This part of psychology, to which we return 
later (Chapter XIV), is as yet comparatively in its 


202 (THEM BANING OR PP SiC OO ery 


infancy. To consider it we have to pass outside the 
bounds of introspection, which are beginning to 
appear curiously and significantly restricted. Our 
minds certainly are far larger than our normal con- 
sciousness, but it may be remarked that this has been 
discovered chiefly through special means (hypnosis 
and psycho-analysis) which have enabled the bounds 
of introspection to be extended. 


CHAPTER XII: LOOKING OUTWARDS 


Our Knowledge of the External World.We are apt 
to regard our knowledge of the outside world as a 
matter of course, and to think that things can hardly 
help being much as we perceive them. But here 
again psychology is unsettling. We are not nearly 
in such close contact as we suppose with even the 
things we seem to know best—our chairs, our motor- 
cycles, our friends. We have seen (Chapter III) 
how stimuli falling upon special sense organs at the 
surface of the body cause impulses to be volleyed 
in along the afferent neurones leading to reception 
and co-ordinating centers; and how they there com- 
pete for the discharge of these centers and thus for 
a share in still more intricate transactions of the 
association circuits. And in the chapters which fol- 
lowed we saw how far from passive we are in our 
perceptions, and the extent to which what we see 
depends upon our needs and interests. We have 
now to look rather more closely at all this with a 
view to discovering, if we may, how much of the 
world is really there before us as we ordinarily 
think it and how much of it is merely a reflection 
of ourselves. 

A first point to settle is our use of the word 
sensation. Something was said about this in the pre~ 
ceding chapter, but we may here remind the reader 
that all sensations are perceptions, though sometimes 

203 


204 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


humble ones. To quote Piéron:* “In reality any 
impression whatever implies a perception, of vary- 
ing precision but undeniable. If I am touched on 
the right arm and I feel something, I can at least 
indicate the approximate region of the body involved, 
if not the exact place of the contact. I do not con- 
fuse the foot with the head and I am sure that it 
is a matter of a contact, not of an odor or light, even 
without being able to state the exact nature of this 


Fic. IX 


contact. As soon as a sensation is definitely felt, an 
excitation received really is occasioning an associative 
reaction which includes the evocation of representa- 
tions and verbal symbols, the taking of attitudes, and, 
if necessary, motor reactions. But when we speak of 
perceptive function we are referring to high degrees 
of this function of elementary thought, which have 
become delicate and exact, as distinguished from the 
crude manifestations which are never absent if there 
is really a definite sensation.” 


* Thought and the Brain (1926), part ii, chap. ii, §3. 


LOOKING OUTWARDS 205 


None the less, a great deal of valuable work upon 
our perceptions has been done on the contrary 
assumption that sensations are independent elements. 
Up to a certain point these hypothetical abstractions 
work well enough; beyond that point they make 
perception incomprehensible. Philosophic doctrines 
based on sensations (they are usually rechristened 
‘sense-data,’ after much discussion of the distinction 
between sensing and what is sensed) are built upon a 
very insecure foundation. 


Fic. X. 


Illusions of Sight and Touch. Certain well-known 
illusions show clearly how complex our perceptual 
processes are even when they seem simple. Bend a 
visiting card or a small piece of smooth paper so 
that it will stand upright like a half-open book upon 
the tablecloth (Fig. IX), and gaze at it with one eye. 
You can see it either as if opening towards you or 
away from you. (Notice also the ways in which 
the colors tend to become more noticeable in the 





LOOKING OUTWARDS 207 


‘unreal’ position.) Or look with both eyes at Fig. X. 
It can be seen either as one cube or as another, or as 
a series of boxes with the tops or the sides off, or as 
a flat design. 





Fic, XII 


The Monument-Gateway ambiguity (Fig. XI) is 
still more striking. By gazing steadily it can be seen 
either as a solid or as an opening; while the staircase 


208 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


below it can also be seen as an overhanging cornice. 
In Figure XII the warriors, though drawn the same 
size, appear, through the illusion of perspective, to 
be one taller than the other. The alternating re- 
lief is related to the Traube-Hering wave phe- 
nomenon of blood pressure, whereas the perspective 
illusion is probably due to the expectation of ocular 
convergence which produces a giant in the middle 
distance. To take a different sense, try to hold a 
walking-stick vertically with your eyes shut and 
your head bent well over to one side, or cross two 
fingers and touch them with a pencil placed between 
them. 

In these ways it is not difficult to convince oneself 
that a great deal more than a mere reception of 
stimuli by the sense organs occurs in perception. The 
detail of the processes responsible for some of these 
illusions is not yet established. The rhythmic fluctua- 
tions which attention is always undergoing certainly 
play a part in illusions of alternating form. But the 
old controversy as to whether the differences are 
due to different judgments about the same sensations 
or to different sensations has shifted to a much more 
subtle and adequate discussion as to how central, at 
what stage inwards from the sense organ, the relevant 
changes are. For example, many visual illusions 
have been traced to eye-movements. Even in such 
an apparently simple matter as the comparison of 
vertical and horizontal lines an illusion is found. We 
over-estimate vertical lines; and this was thought to 
be due to the greater difficulty of raising the eyes as 


LOOKING OUTWARDS 209 


compared with shifting them sideways. But by show- 
ing the lines to be compared only for a moment, 
this effect of eye-movements is cut out, yet the ver- 
tical line is still over-estimated. The conclusion 
drawn is that though actual eye-movements may be 
originally involved, once visual space-perception has 
been acquired, more central processes can do their 
work for them. 

Eye-movements. It will repay us to consider eye- 
movements a little more closely. Without the ex- 
perimental work and without the neurological evi- 
dence, we should never have realized what an 
astonishing amount they do for us, and how much 
of our world depends upon them. 

Consider dizziness, for example. This seems to 
us merely an odd and unpleasant experience to be 
avoided when possible. Yet it is but the exaggerated 
or disturbed working of a mechanism without which 
we should never know where we are or where any- 
thing else is. Whenever we turn about, a small 
apparatus within the ears, containing a fluid resem- 
bling sea water,’ very like a set of spirit-levels and 
known as the semicircular canals, takes note of it 
much as a half-emptied flask in our pocket would. 
But this agitation in itself tells us nothing. It does 
not directly give rise to perceptions; the semicircular 
canals have no direct connections with the cortex of 
the cerebrum. And yet our sense of orientation, our 
knowledge of which way we are facing, and our 


* This, together with the salinity of our blood-plasma, is part of 
the evidence for man’s aquatic existence in the remote past. 


210 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


whole left-and-right-turn consciousness, undoubtedly 
do depend upon what happens in these semicircular 
canals. ‘Lhey tell us indirectly by a reflex provoca- 
tion of turning movements of the eyes to right and 
left. It is these eye-movements which tell us when 
we turn, and without them we have no sense of 
turning. ‘The dizzy man, when he shuts his eyes, 
feels as though 4e was turning; if he opens them the 
things he sees seem to spin round, but the other way. 

This extraordinary indirectness with which we per- 
ceive what is happening is paralleled almost every- 
where in perception. Consider how we locate sounds. 
For low notes it is easy. The tympanic membranes 
in the two ears are in different phases of vibration; 
but once again this difference does not of itself give 
rise to direct perception of where the sound is. 
Here again, reflexes involving eye-movements come 
in, and it is the same in the more difficult matter of 
locating high notes and noises. Notice, moreover, a 
very curious fact. Attention directed to two sounds 
with a view to distinguishing them fails when the 
difference between them is decreased to a certain 
minimum. But the differences made use of in locat- 
ing sounds are far less than this. In other words, 
the differential threshold for the reflex by which 
location is effected is lower than that for the 
sensation.” 

* This, of course, applies to passive turning. Muscular perceptions 
obviously come in when we twist our trunk or limbs. 

*It has been suggested that water-diviners who perceive the 


presence of a spring or stream deep under the surface of the earth 
by the movement in their hands of the divining rod are showing a 


LOOKING OUTWARDS 211 


If we place two suitably chosen sources of sound 
at different distances from the ‘subject’ of an experi- 
ment we can get him to localize them as one source. 
Where he imagines it to be depends upon the sounds. 
Now if we vary the frequency of one of the sources, 
he perceives this change as a movement of the 
imaginary source, before he perceives it as a change 
in the sound. 

The same indirectness turns up even in the way 
in which we locate touches on the skin. A pinch or 
a stab with a pin might seem to be given directly 
just where it is; but not so. It has to be found, so 
to speak, and its localization depends upon the re- 
flexes which it sets up; if these are deranged it 
becomes misplaced. 

Recognition. But these are mere superficial com- 
plexities in the mechanism of perception. Let us go 
a step deeper. Consider how we perceive forms 
which are familiar to us. Something is put into our 
hand; we perceive it instantly to be a key without 
any process of exploring it with the fingers. Certain 
injuries to the brain make this impossible, but we 
may still be able by exploratory movements to make 
out its shape and form without being able to recog- 
nize it as a key. And other injuries produce the 
converse effect. We can tell that it is a key, yet 
cannot work out what the shape is. This last is the 
really puzzling instance. We can find many parallels 
in normal life. There are people, there are expres- 


similar capacity. If so, the auditory threshold for the reflex must be 
very low indeed. 


212 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


sions, there are situations which we recognize in- 
stantly, yet if we try to work out what it is that 
distinguishes them from other people, expressions, 
or situations, we fail altogether to get a satisfactory 
explanation. Of course in such cases we may make 
mistakes, and probably far more often than we sup- 
pose. Yet how a chair seen from a new angle is 
recognized at once as that same chair, is the funda- 
mental question in perception. 

It is natural to suppose that something, its color 
or some detail of shape, is the cause of the identifi- 
cation; and this no doubt is usually the case. But 
the detail itself may be presented to us at an angle 
from which we have never before perceived it. The 
more difficult problem is how this mew aspect may 
be instantly responded to, in spite of its difference 
from all the aspects which we have formerly beheld. 
It seems clear that the mind (or a co-ordination 
center in the brain, if we prefer so to put it) responds 
not only to stimuli which it has already received, 
but thereafter to a certain range of stimuli. When 
these other stimuli closely resemble the original, 
this 1s not surprising. But in many cases the set of 
aspects by which we instantly recognize a thing are 
extraordinarily varied. A coin seen with the rim or 
the flat side showing is very different. Yet we 
recognize even unfamiliar things from new aspects 
without difficulty. 

Sign-interpretation. This fact, that we recognize 
what we have never seen, is not difficult to explain 
if we take account of the ways in which our outlook 


LOOKING OUTWARDS 213 


upon the world has developed. The child, as we 
saw in Chapter VIII, is comparatively deficient in 
this power. But the adult has been watching things 
move and studying their systematic transformations 
of shape most of his life. Thus as regards most 
objects a very wide range of shapes have become 
equivalent for him; they are aspects of one object. 
When he sees a new object, the trace or disposition 
left in him is not a single isolated pattern of the 
sensory stimulation, but a setting, ready if need be 
to respond to an immense variety of patterns—most 
of those, in fact, into which this pattern can be trans- 
formed by movements of the object. It is this dis- 
position, the product not only of the original sight of 
the object, but of all his former experience with 
somewhat similar objects, that enables him to in- 
terpret aright the new aspect, when it comes. This 
influence of experience explains why the expert—the 
entomologist or the seaman, for example—is so much 
more quick and accurate than the amateur in inter- 
preting professional signs. 

Most recognition is an extremely complicated per- 
formance. We have seen already how interest 
affects it. But innumerable other factors also play a 
part. The whole situation must be taken into account 
if we are to understand recognition. For example, 
a stimulus which in war-time we should interpret 
rightly as a sign of an air raid we may equally rightly 
after the cessation of hostilities interpret as an earth- 
quake. Yet in neither case need we make any con- 
scious reference to the international situation. The 


214 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


general circumstances bar out all but a relatively 
small number of the possibilities and our recogni- 
tion is a choice between those responses which are 
left. Sufficient attention is rarely given to these 
wider factors in interpretation by those who concen- 
trate on the elementary problems of recognition. 

General Consequences. But on any possible view 
of recognition in the light of the facts and analyses 
now at our disposal our account of interpretation in 
the wider sense, the sense in which it is relevant to 
current speculation on the reality of the external 
world, must make psychology the key to the riddle 
of the universe. To some, indeed, psychological 
study seems to yield conclusive evidence that our 
curiosity as to the nature of things must forever 
remain unsatisfied. ‘We can never solve the so- 
called world-riddle because what seem riddles to us 
are merely the contradictions we have ourselves 
created,” says Havelock Ellis. “We make our own 
world; when we have made it awry we can remake 
it approximately truer. . . . Man lives by imagina- 
tion.” And Vaihinger has urged that the contradic- 
tions which thought endeavors to resolve are actually 
essential to its successful operation. In any case, he 
holds, we can never free ourselves from psychologi- 
cal accretions; for just as the digestive system breaks 
up the matter which it receives, mixes it with its own 
juices and so makes it suitable for assimilation in 
the practical interests of the organism, “so the psyche 
envelops the thing perceived with categories which 
it has developed out of itself.” 


LOOKING OUTWARDS eae 


The Psychology of Fictions. Ourintellectualchyme 
and chyle would, for those who accept this ap- 
proximately Kantian account, be no guide whatever 
to the physical happenings outside our skin, since 
perception is not even a process of assimilation on 
the causal view; nothing of the external stimulus 
(usually a form of vibration) is actually taken in 
by the receptors. “Our sensations produce within 
the psyche itself purely subjective processes to which, 
in the modern view, nothing in reality—picture it as 
we will—can correspond”; and the explanation of the 
way in which we distort reality and yet successfully 
cope with it “1s to be sought in the nature of thought 
itself.” In other words, the only field open to the 
metaphysically inclined would be the study of the 
mental processes to which external stimuli give rise. 
The interest—and the intricacy—of the study would, 
of course, be further enhanced by the allied study of 
the behavior and distortions of the various symbol- 
systems by which analytic and reflective (‘discursive’) 
thought is supported; of the languages, that is to say, 
in which knowledge is enshrined. 

Fictions in Modern Physics. This insistence on the 
psychological foundations of our theories of the ex- 
ternal world receives frequent support from the 
utterances of the most respected modern physicists. 

For some, the tendency of the mind (on which 
Bergson and Wallon have laid much stress) to select 
only the permanent, reinforced as it is by the analytic 
influence of language, has seemed of necessity to 





216 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


render any scientific account of the universe arbitrary. 
And apart from this selection of the primary entities 
from which physics is able to construct a self-con- 
tained system by virtue of cyclic definition, the theory 
of relativity has much to say about the mental factor 
in scientific explanation. “All through the physical 
world,” according to Professor Eddington, “runs an 
unknown content, which must really be the stuff of 
our consciousness. . . . We have found that where 
science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but 
regained from nature that which the mind has put 
into nature. We have found a strange footprint 
on the shores of the unknown. We have devised 
profound theories, one after another, to account for 
its origin. At last we have succeeded in recon- 
structing the creature that made the footprint. And 
lo! it is our own.”* Of particular interest is the 
suggestion that ‘time,’ the whole ‘historical’ concep- 
tion of things, is a mental contribution; that events 
do not ‘happen,’ but we happen to come across them 
—and might under certain circumstances know the 
past from the future instead of the future from the 
past! And it was Einstein himself who, in a speech 
in honor of Planck in 1918, spoke of the ideal of 
physics as the attainment of a world-picture, and of 
the motives which impel men “to seek a simplified 
synoptic view of the world conformable to their own 


* Space, Time, and Gravitation (1922), pp. 200-201. This view 
of the mental factor in science is further elaborated in Professor 
Eddington’s essay on “The Domain of Physical Science” in Science, 
Religion and Reality, 1925 (by ten authors). 


LOOKING OUTWARDS 243 


nature, overcoming the world by replacing it with 
this picture.” 

Moreover, it is not sufficiently stressed by histori- 
ans of philosophy that on a systematic reclassification 
of the subject-matter of the sciences not only ‘so- 
lipsists’* (Lat. solus, ipse=alone, myself) but the 
majority of those who in the past have called them- 
selves Idealists, maintaining that to be known is to 
be “in the mind” or an “invention of the mind,” 
have in reality still further extended the scope of a 
possible psychology, though without themselves 
actually embarking on its details. 

New World Vistas. It is as though soon after the 
return of Columbus general opinion in Europe, while 
admitting the existence of a land in the West which 
might profitably be further explored, was unable to 
realize the significance of the discovery. The ap- 
peals of pioneers for support in further explora- 
tion meet, let us suppose, with undue apathy, even 
with a certain skepticism; El Dorado, it is replied, 
is in all probability altogether elsewhere; this so- 
called America seems to contain dangerous and not 
altogether respectable inmates, and in any case there 
is no reason to suppose that the land discovered 
is not part of China—which has already been largely 
explored by Polo and other reliable observers. Our 

2Cf. N. R. Campbell, Physics: The Elements (Cambridge, 1920), 
part i, p. 264: “Ultimately the conclusion cannot be avoided that 
other persons (if any one cares to express it so) are merely inventions 
of my own mind.” It is worth recording, however, that the rest 


of Dr. Campbell’s work is a valuable and level-headed discussion of 
material objects and other people. 


218 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


far-sighted travelers, however, are insistent: for 1s 
not what they have already seen sufficient to satisfy 
anyone that the Old World must eventually suifer 
eclipse? They appeal to respected authorities: and 
call to their aid historical research—which reveals 
that the wisest and the most speculative alike have 
located in the States the possible source of all that 
is least understood and most essential to the future 
of humanity; the nest of the great auk, the lost 
Atlantis, the spot to which flies go in winter, Funda- 
mentalism, the most Humorous Stories, Ford Cars, 
and Untold Natural Resources. Their case 1s un- 
doubtedly stronger. If but a few of the prophets 
and sages are justified in their attributions, the im- 
portance of this America cannot, they urge, be denied. 
In due course the invasion of Stratford-on-Avon 
occurs.” 

So it may be with Psychology. 

The Human Equation. The general question, there- 
fore, raised at the beginning of this chapter—How 
far do our ways of perceiving the world really tell 
us what it is like and how far do they only tell us 
what we are like?—is one which the psychologist 
will ultimately be called upon to answer. It may 
be that the physicist, in reacting against an uncritical 
account of ‘matter,’ will be found to have gone too 
far. But in any case the sort of difficulties we have 
been considering are essential preliminaries to that 

2 For the more subtle influences of America on the psychology of 


Europeans, New World Vistas, by James Wood (Kegan Paul, 
1926), should be read. 


LOOKING OUTWARDS 219 


answer, remote though the issue may have appeared 
to those who approach the subject for the first time. 
The reorientations and revaluations which have given 
rise to psychology asa serious branch of science have 
occurred in the lifetime of many who are still 
engaged in its development. It is still premature to 
speak of final conclusions when we are only begin- 
ning to learn to think. 

It is surprising how little the psychology of 
imagination has as yet been utilized in the service of 
physics. Our powers of conceiving the world in 
other aspects than those suggested by foraging and 
engineering have hardly been explored at all. 
Writers like Lewis Carroll, Fournier d’Albe, Helen 
Keller, Nicod, and Wells have, in different ways, no 
less than the physicists we have mentioned, made a 
remarkable beginning. But the windows which 
might be opened on the world by a full study of 
animal, primitive, and abnormal psychology (cf. 
Chapter XVII) are still for the most part darkened 
by prejudice and ignorance. At any rate, it is clear 
that for some time to come a chief task of psychology 
is that of demarcation; for, as we shall see when 
dealing with emotion, we constantly project our 
feelings as well as our constructions into the outer 
world. Psychology can point to the difference be- 
tween the infant and the trained observer in all 
branches of natural knowledge, and it can describe 
this difference fairly definitely. The child, as we 
saw, fails comparatively to separate the factors in 
perception introduced by his desires from the factors 


220 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


which the external situation supplies. The pursuit 
of truth is the slow weeding out of the desire factors. 
One of the chief ways in which it is done is through 
the distinction between means and ends. To remain 
unbiased in the manipulation of means is often indis- 
pensable if we are to attain the ends desired. Thus 
the scientist learns not to cook his evidence if he 
wishes to prove his conclusion. Even the astronomer 
has a ‘personal equation’ to eliminate, before he 
regards his observations as objective. 

When all desire has been discounted we may still, 
as Vaihinger maintains, be left in our view of nature 
with a distortion due to the instrument (the mind) 
which is viewing it. For this distortion the only 
possible correction is an exact knowledge of how the 
mind works. In other words, psychology must 
criticize itself. Our account of the mind must at 
least be such that the mind could know about itself. 
And probably the desire-bias of which we have 
spoken is stronger in psychology than in any other 
science. We may well be such as we should hate 
to think we are. For some of these biases, however, 
we are learning to allow, chiefly as a result of the 
discoveries of the psycho-analysts. But we shall be 
more ready to discuss their findings when we have 
considered how we think and the nature of our 
emotions. 


CHAPTER XIII: HOW WE THINK 


Ideas. Thinking, according to Babbitt, would con- 
sist in getting hold of, getting rid of, arranging, and 
working out ideas; but just what ideas are is a point 
which he leaves vague. It is this point which we have 
now to consider. 

One account which is of great historical significance 
regards ideas as images. Ideas obviously represent 
in some way the things that they are of; and since 
images are the mental events which most plainly 
represent things, this view had much in its favor. 
But it breaks down if we have to admit that many 
people think without images, that even when images 
occur they may be quite irrelevant and accidental, 
and that they tend to appear chiefly after the think- 
ing has got into difficulties. 

The most thorough work on this point has been 
done by the group of psychologists known as the 
Wiirzburg School. Their method looks simple, but 
actually is very difficult and laborious. An experi- 
menter sits down with his subject and sets him a 
series of problems carefully chosen beforehand. For 
instance, he asks him, “Can you calculate the velocity 
of a freely falling body?” or, “Does evolution in- 
volve progress?” The subject replies ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as 
soon as he has made up his mind. The time taken 
is noted and then the subject dictates as full an 
account as he can of what has been happening in his 

221 


222° THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


mind, the experimenter meanwhile carefully study- 
ing the way in which this account is given, the sub- 
ject’s hesitations, degree of certainty, and so forth. 
After a great deal of careful practice it becomes much 
more easy to notice what happens than the reader 
may suppose. 

Images. The result of the best of these studies is 
to show that images are not the essential ingredients 
of thinking, and the same conclusion applies also to 
words, the other definite and easily recognizable 
entities which have been suggested as what we are 
really talking about when we speak of ideas. Quite 
often the thinking is finished before any words have 
come into the mind and a definite search for suitable 
words follows. Buta failure to understand may give 
rise to a need for words in order to formulate the 
difficulty more clearly. And the same applies to 
images when the problem concerns concrete things 
that we are accustomed to handle and look at. 
Briefly, words and images are invaluable helps in 
thinking; they are not necessary to it. 

It is important to realize that individuals differ 
enormously in the type of image they employ. One 
man will use predominantly visual images (though 
many who think they are visualizers are really mak- 
ing use of eye-movements); another, auditory; 
another, kinesthetic—.e., images of movements of 
the limbs and trunk. Indeed, every sensation may 
have its corresponding imagery, and organic sensa- 
tions, which, as we shall see, play a great part in 
emotion, may also be represented. What are some- 


HOW WE THINK 223 


times referred to as verbal images are of course only 
images of words and not a special type of image; 
they may be of three kinds, visual (as when we see 
a printed or written word in the mind’s eye), 
auditory (as when we hear an imagined voice), or 
motor (as when we have an image corresponding to 
the sensations which accompany speech). It is found 
in aphasia that injuries to the brain may sometimes 
cause grave disabilities in one form of verbal imagery, 
though not in the others. Some people are reported 
to have no images at all. The usual case is for one 
type to be predominant, though not to the exclusion 
of the others. The point is of practical importance, 
since it is of little use to appeal to a person of a 
primarily auditory type by means of diagrams or 
metaphors deriving from vision. All forms of 
imagery tend to be heightened at the onset of sleep, 
and this may be connected with the fact that vivid 
imagery is more frequent in childhood. The vivid- 
ness of dream images may be a result of regression 
or a return to the state of our early years (cf. Chap- 
ters VIII and XV). 

Attitudes. But the rest of the conscious happen- 
ings which take place in thinking are far less easy to 
describe: a sense of the end to be reached, a sense of 
the direction in which the thought is moving, a sense 
of orientation, of our whereabouts, senses of novelty 
and familiarity and of reality, of ease and difficulty, 
of the relations between our thoughts, and a variety 
of attitudes towards.the stages of the thinking, to- 
wards the problem and the answer. These and many 


224 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


more such things are reported. We can recognize 
them easily enough in most of our thinking. Some 
of them belong rather to the conative and affective 
aspects of experience than to the cognitive (cf. Chap- 
ter XI). But to understand what kind of thing 
they are is not easy. As Binet wrote: “Further re- 
searches have chiefly brought into evidence our 1gno- 
rance,” and at present from the standpoint of intro- 
spection we can but humbly accept this conclusion. 

This incurable elusiveness of thinking is the rea- 
son why so many have fallen back upon imagery, 
the least slippery of introspective data, as the key to 
the matter. Thinking somehow is a mode of manipu- 
lating representations of the world. Perhaps we 
use images even when we can’t detect them? But 
plainly, such a suggestion can only be considered in 
the last resort. 

Representation. It is worth while looking more 
closely at what representation involves. It is tempt- 
ing to suppose that the only way in which one thing 
(a mental event, for example) can represent another 
(a lobster, perhaps) is by resembling it. Accord- 
ingly, many philosophers have made resemblance, 
identity of structure, fundamental for the explana- 
tion of how our ideas come to be of things. “We 
make for ourselves pictures of facts,” says Wittgen- 
stein in his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 
“The picture is a model of reality.” But 1s this 
resemblance really necessary? The instances we gave 
in the last chapter of the indirect ways in which we 
take cognizance of space are enough to make it very 


HOW WE THINK 225 


doubtful. The movement of a klaxon down the 
street and the reflexes through which we notice it 
seem to have no very obvious identity of structure. 
And in fact the more closely we study the processes 
by which we perceive things the less plausible is it 
to suppose that they are necessarily reflections or 
models of the things. Yet in some sense they 
represent these things. What is this sense? The 
answer seems to be that our mental events represent 
things not through being models or reflections of 
them, but by being the effects in us of contact with 
them. | 

The point at issue may appear a little obscure, but 
the question is really very simple and, like many 
simple questions, it is of fundamental importance. 
What is the link between our minds and the world in 
virtue of which our thoughts are about the world, 
are thoughts of things, not merely isolated happen- 
ings in our minds? In other words, what is knowing? 
If we can answer this question, the rest of our account 
of thinking is an easier matter. For thinking 1s 
merely the testing and manipulation of knowledge in 
the service of our purposes. 

Until recently, views on this basic problem have 
usually been minor varieties of one opinion. And 
this has amounted to saying that the problem is in- 
soluble, or that it is not a psychological problem. 
The relation of our thoughts to the things they are 
of has been said to be an unique and ultimate relation. 
It has been called the ‘subject-object relation, it 
has been named ‘awareness,’ ‘cognition,’ or ‘appre- 


226 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


hension’; or the thing has been said to be ‘presented’ 
tothe mind. But this is merely to name the problem, 
not to attack it. A reader opening most of the stand- 
ard classical works on psychology for the first time 
will experience unnecessary bewilderment and dis- 
appointment when he looks for an answer to this 
question. And yet some sort of an answer may 
reasonably be expected. After all, we are thinking 
about things most of our lives. We ought to be able 
to give some account of how we do it. 

The simplest form of thinking about things is 
perceiving them, and this we have already described 
above. The next most obvious form is imagining 
them, through reproducing the mental events which 
occurred in perception. In both these forms of 
thinking the significant relation between the mental 
event (the perceiving or the imagining) and the thing 
perceived or imagined is that the thing is the principal 
cause, in a way which we can trace, of the mental 
event. The thought is of ¢his thing rather than that 
because it is caused by this thing, not by that. Be- 
cause it 1s a response to this thing, not to that. A 
flash of lightning causes in us an experience. How 
it does so we know in outline. The view which is 
gaining ground is that this causal connection between 
the flash and the perceiving of it is the knowing rela- 
tion itself. But it has often been held that the causal 
connection is only the condition of the knowing, that 
when it holds another relation of quite a different 
kind mysteriously arises, namely, the presentation of 
the flash to the mind. If something further could 


HOW WE THINK 227 


be said about this alleged relation, the case for it 
would be stronger. It may be suspected that such 
accounts are due to a disguised persistence of the 
view, common in children and primitive peoples, that 
to think of something is in some way to direct an 
influence upon it; partly also perhaps to presumptu- 
ous man’s reluctance to accept the operations of the 
mind as natural facts, to his preference for regarding 
the mind as in some sense outside nature. It is one 
of the merits of Behaviorism, of the psychology of 
‘stimulus and response,’ that it has helped greatly 
to stress the causal view of knowing. 

We have seen how, through retention (Chapters 
III and IV), we come to react to situations which 
are not present. Thinking about absent things is 
essentially reacting as though they were not absent. 
As Rignano’ rightly says, thinking is experimenta- 
tion. It is a process of experimenting not with 
things, but with their mental representatives. And 
these representatives are ideas. Ideas will include 
images as a special sub-class, and also words in some 
cases, when we are dealing with topics very familiar 
to us, for instance; in such cases, if only the words 
are occurring, Watson’s account of thinking as sub- 
vocal talking would clearly apply.” But as a rule 

* The Psychology of Reasoning (1923). Rignano lays great stress 
upon imaginary experiments; and, with the proviso that actual 
images need not be involved in them, his account is very clear and 
helpful. 

* Two questions must always be distinguished: (1) What are the 


happenings in us when we think? and (2) What is the link between 
these happenings and the things which they are of? We should 


228 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


words only represent things through other ideas. 
The majority of the processes in our minds which 
represent things, and so are ideas, are probably 
neither images nor words. 

Emotional Representation. In some cases, with 
certain types, though rarely with those engaged in 
intellectual activities, the representing idea may be 
an emotion, a feeling, or a mood. Primitive men, and 
probably animals, classify and distinguish between 
objects less by means of representations of them in 
the strict sense than by revivals of emotions to which 
they have given rise. These emotive classifications 
are the germ of all thought and we tend constantly 
to fall back upon them, in what, for example, are 
known as ‘intuitive’ judgments of people’s personal- 
ities. We often judge a new acquaintance to be 
‘sly,’ less from any namable characters of his ap- 
pearance or behavior than through the emotion which 
he arouses. We use the emotion as a sign, over- 
looking, as far as consciousness goes, the signs which 
were of course, necessary for the emotion to arise. 
We shall see in the next chapter, in connection with 
the autonomic nervous system, how these very subtle 
intuitive responses are brought about. Similarly we 
often think of absent persons in terms of the feeling 
we have for them. It is hardly necessary to point 
out that such thinking, apart from the fact that it 
remember that this link is as a rule very indirect. A good deal of 
mathematics is a way of thinking by means of symbols about opera- 
tions with symbols that stand only for general aspects of things with 


which ordinary observation deals, of course less successfully, in other 
ways. 


HOW WE THINK 229 


cannot be developed by means of verbal symbols, 
is highly elusive and variable, though often capable 
of great delicacy and penetration. 

Association. We may now go back to Mr. Babbitt 
and his account, correct so far as it goes of what we 
do with our ideas when we think. First as to how 
we get them together. This is what is known as 
the association of ideas. The classical doctrine was 
that the ruling principle here is contiguity. If two 
ideas have occurred together in the past, or if the 
sources of them, our contacts with the things which 
they represent, were originally together, then the one 
will tend to be accompanied again by the other. 
This is the obvious consequence of retention as we 
studied it in Chapter III, and it admittedly plays 
a great part. Other things being equal, contiguity 
rules; but, as later work has shown, other things 
never are equal. Contiguity operates only subject to 
the guidance of interest. If we are thinking about 
golf, the ideas which are associated with the idea of 
grass will be quite different from those which will 
gather if we are thinking about Nebuchadnezzar. 
The governing principle in association is the direction 
of interest, and contiguity only works inside this 
principle. Clearness and consecutiveness of thinking, 
in other words, depends primarily upon clearness in 
our interests. Perhaps most of the blunders of 
thought are due to confused and mixed interests. 
The extraordinary views of many demented persons 
can be traced to eccentricities of their interests. 

We may consider two typical failures in thinking 


230 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


from this point of view, the undue persistence of an 
irrelevant set of ideas and the failure to hit on the 
relevant idea even when it ought to be obvious. The 
first usually springs from an intrusion of interests 
which have nothing to do with the situation; the 
second either from a weakness of the relevant interest 
or from the same kind of cause as the first. For 
whatever we may be thinking about on any occasion 
it is fairly certain that our interests will be far more 
mixed than we suppose. Now each of our interests 
acts in a twofold way. It facilitates some processes 
and inhibits others. And stupidity in the form of 
overlooking the obvious key-idea of the situation, 
that distressing but familiar complaint from which 
we all suffer so constantly, is chiefly a matter of the 
inhibition of this key-idea by some interest which 
may be influencing us quite unawares. 

Some of the phenomena of forgetting names are 
illuminating here. We shall understand them better 
when we have discussed in Chapter XV how the 
mind goes wrong, but it will be helpful to allude to 
them now. We often find ourselves forgetting one 
name out of a group, it may even be the name we 
are most familiar with among them. This seems 
inexplicable until perhaps we notice, after looking 
it up, that a minute or two later we are slightly de- 
pressed and going over in our minds irksome thoughts 
of things not done or of occasions when we made 
fools of ourselves. Then we notice, perhaps, that 
the name is similar in sound to the name of a central 
figure in these irksome reflections. 


HOW WE THINK 231 


These bizarre twists illustrate the very indirect 
ways in which our interests can interfere with one 
another. And a great many of our more puzzling 
momentary and localized stupidities may be put 
down to this cause. People very commonly refuse 
to form new ideas rather owing to the discomfort the 
ideas would produce than through any real in- 
tellectual difficulty. But general stupidity, like 
forgetting, has wider sources. Apart from gross 
physiological causes—fever, fatigue, and the like— 
it may come from insufficient experience and fa- 
miliarity with the right kinds of situation. We 
handle our ideas of things much as we handle the 
things themselves, and no one can be expected to 
work out in thought what is wrong with a car if he 
has never had much to do with cars. 

Concepts. In addition to the thinking that is a 
recapitulation, as it were, of the concrete handling of 
things, there is another, a higher order of thinking, 
abstract or conceptual thinking as it may be called; 
and individuals differ in this even more than they 
do in the simpler kind of thinking. 

_We saw in the preceding chapter that we can 
recognize a chair even when it is seen from an un- 
familiar angle. There must be a structure in the 
mind by which it recognizes not this or that partic- 
ular sensory pattern, but any one of a vast range 
of patterns which are indifferently taken for the 
chair. Similarly going a stage higher, we have struc- 
tures which recognize not this or that chair, but any 
chair; and, higher still, a piece of furniture as such. 


232 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


This hierarchy of higher and higher co-ordinating 
perceptual structures is paralleled in thinking. Our 
particular ideas of individual cars stand to our general 
idea or ‘concept? of a car just as the particular sensory 
patterns which the chair may present stand to our re- 
cognition of it as the chair. The concept is a higher 
level co-ordinating structure which responds indif- 
ferently to any one of an indefinitely large range 
of particular representations. And it may in ab- 
stract thinking operate in conjunction with other 
concepts without the aid of any particular representa- 
tions at all. When this abstract thinking gets into 
difficulties we fall back upon particular represen- 
tations, often in the form of images, in order to see 
where we are going wrong, just as we look again at 
the chair if for any reason our first recognition of it 
seems to be misleading us. We climb down from 
our higher level, so to speak. 

People differ enormously in the level at which 
they think most successfully and in the degree to 
which they develop these higher structures and can 
get ahead without constant recourse to particular 
representations. Great practical success, as with many 
business men, engineers, and doctors, is possible with- 
out abstract ideas or concepts. or success in the 
wider understanding of things, however, they are 
indispensable and they offer innumerable short cuts 
even in the most practical matters. But, as is well 
known, short cuts have their dangers and the theorist 
who cannot climb down and get back to facts and 
instances soon becomes a lost man. 


HOW WE THINK 233 


The Influence of Language on Thought. Most ab- 
stract thinking tends easily to wander. Thus a con- 
crete record, plan, or scheme of its steps is invaluable 
toit. This it is one of the main functions of language 
to provide, though not, as we have seen (Chapter 
IX), its primary or original function. Words strung 
together give a kind of mechanical model of think- 
ing. In the case of mathematics, which by starting 
from the simplest aspects of things has become the 
most developed form of abstract thinking, the 
words, the symbolism, employed to represent the 
steps and stages of the thinking have become nearly 
perfect. But ordinary language is a comparatively 
crude representation of thinking. This is partly be- 
cause it has other simultaneous jobs to do as well. 
It reflects the thinker’s attitudes to things as well 
as his thoughts about them, and it is bent and twisted 
throughout in the interests of communication. For 
language, in addition to serving the thinker himself, 
is used in order to make other people go through the 
same thinking processes. The troubles which this 
entails are unending." The moral for all discussion 
is that we should not mistake the verbal formulation 
for the thought itself, and should remember that 
it is always at best an imperfect representation of 
it. 

There is another aspect of this influence of 
language upon thought which should be mentioned. 

* For a discussion of these aspects of language see the author’s The 


Meaning of Meaning, pp. 358-360; also Richards, Principles of 
Literary Criticism, p. 261. 


234 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


It is often said * that we get many of our concepts 
given us ready-made by language. We should notice 
that this is only a loose and superficial way of talk- 
ing. We get the words, but the thoughts in connec- 
tion with which we use them are our own achieve- 
ment, helped, of course, immensely by intercourse 
with others. A very great number of our words and 
forms of speech we use without any corresponding 
concepts. We make a purely conventional use of 
them, uttering them on the same sorts of occasions 
as other people do, and without thought. But when 
we do think with them our thinking is the product 
of our own experience carried up to one level or 
another; and thus the thoughts of people using the 
same words may be, as we are always painfully dis- 
covering, very different. It would be convenient if 
concepts could be acquired ready-made in this fash- 
ion, but actually they have to be arrived at by more 
arduous means. Educators in particular should never 
forget that to give the language is one thing and to 
cause corresponding concepts to be developed is quite 
another. 

Thinking is often described in terms of beliefs, 
judgments, propositions, assumptions, hypotheses, 
and arguments.” A belief would by many schools be 

* E.g., H. Delacroix, “La plus grand partie de nos concepts nous 


arrive toute formée par le langage,” in Traité de Psychologie, ii, 
p. 127. 

* How psychology may be treated by the very acute thinkers who 
have favored the logical and mathematical approaches will be 
gathered from the work of Meinong, Uber Annahmen, part i, chap. 
i, (cf. Urban, Valuation), or from Professor Moore’s Philosophical 
Studies, chap. ii. 


HOW WE THINK 235 


described as a group of ideas united by an act of 
judgment which predicates some of these ideas of 
others, thus forming a proposition, which as a whole 
is asserted. The stringing together of such assertions 
would constitute argument or discursive thought. 
This type of analysis is usually encountered in the 
introductory chapters of treatises on logic. It has 
a long and distinguished history, since the discussion 
of the thought processes in a narrow sense and in 
almost complete separation from the other aspects 
of mental activity, made up until comparatively 
recently the major part of psychology. For some of 
the logician’s special purposes it has its advantages, 
but it presents an essentially artificial view of think- 
ing. As so often in psychology, the distinctions 
which are convenient for one purpose are misleading, 
unless they can be reinterpreted, for another. We 
have refused throughout these pages to regard ideas, 
images, or perceptions as entities independent of the 
activities in the course of which they arise. We 
must treat judgments, beliefs, propositions and hy- 
potheses in the same fashion. The difference then 
between a belief or a proposition which is accepted 
and asserted and one which is merely entertained, 
supposed, or assumed, is, apart from differences in 
the belief feelings which we discuss in the next 
chapter, a difference in the way in which we use them. 
They are groups of ideas which are formed in the 
service of our interests. They are ways in which our 
interests are working themselves out. A settled be- 
lief isan arrangement of ideas which in a certain field 


236 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


of occasions is going to be used to control action. 
Provisional beliefs, hypotheses, and assumptions are 
arrangements which are being experimented with, 
on a large or on a small scale. The difference is 
paralleled exactly in our handling of objects, even in 
cases where no reflection and no consciousness inter- 
vene. We handle liquids and solids, for example, 
quite differently; and our most settled beliefs are 
those which correspond to such routines of daily ex- 
perience and behavior. 

Any such functional group of ideas as a belief or 
a proposition has, of course, an intricate internal 
structure: these units of thought may take all the 
forms which experience suggests and, in mathematics, 
for example, new forms which only prolonged ex- 
perimentation could have evolved. Many of these 
patterns of thought are indirectly represented in 
grammar. Compare ‘He will come’ with ‘He may 
come.’ But grammar is nearly always ambiguous. 
The difference here may be in the group of ideas 
itself, a looser structure in the second example; or 
it may lie not in the group of ideas, but in our at- 
titude to it as a whole, to ‘his coming’ as a unit, the 
same in both cases. To take another pair of ex- 
amples. Much controversy has raged round the 
question whether the ‘time-element? in ‘He fell? and 
‘He will fall’ is in the ‘proposition’ (i.e., in psy- 
chological language, the group of ideas) or in our 
attitude to it. It is possible to be extraordinarily 
subtle over the point in the language of ‘propositions’ 
and ‘propositional functions’—the language of math- 


HOW WE THINK 237 


ematical logic—but it seems unlikely on general 
grounds that the mind is incapable of handling the 
difference in both ways. In all such problems of 
analysis everything depends, of course, upon our 
purpose and the context in which we make the 
assertion. 

The logical analysis of thinking, then, is neither 
a rival to nor in conflict with the psychological, 
though it may often seem to be so. Here, as con- 
stantly in psychology, we have to deal with what 
amounts to a double or triple staffing of the system— 
if we may compare the ideas by which we think 
about mental happenings with the personnel which 
directs a railway. It would be very inconvenient to 
have two or more staffs looking after the same 
branch line if their aims were, as here, divergent, 
and it seems reasonable that the special interests and 
conceptions of the logicians should give way to the 
more general claims of psychology. They will in 
the end lose nothing by so doing. 

We must now turn to consider the emotional side 
of life. As we have suggested, much of the diffi- 
culty and confusion of thinking is only explicable 
when we take account of this other aspect of our 
mental activities. . 


CHAPTER XIV: EMOTION AND 
CHARACTER 


Our emotions are the most obscure part of our 
lives, and, as might be expected, the theory of 
emotion is the most backward part of psychology. 
This is the reason for postponing detailed consider- 
ation of it to so late a stage, not any minor or sec- 
ondary importance of the emotional aspect of 
experience and behavior. On the contrary, the 
history of a life is a history of interests rather than 
of ideas; and, if we could follow it closely enough, 
we should find that an understanding of the emo- 
tional situation was at every turn the key to the rest. 
Moreover, it is on his emotional organization that a 
man’s character essentially depends. 

Emotional Reverberation. A surprising amount is 
known already about the phenomena of emotion and 
the difficulty is less due to a lack of data than to 
indecision as to what is to be called cause and what 
effect among these phenomena. Let us examine 
first the theory around which most recent discussion 
has revolved. This is the celebrated Lange-James 
hypothesis of organic resonance, so called after the 
two adherents who first brought it into prominence. 

In fear, the perception of an alarming object, or 
of an alarming change in the situation, is followed 
not only by characteristic action, but by an extensive 
agitation all through the body. Changes take place 

238 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER 239 


in the digestive, respiratory, glandular, and circula- 
tory organs. Our hair stands on end, we blush or 
grow pale, we sweat, our pupils dilate, our digestive 
canal is paralyzed, our pulse quickens, and so forth. 
Most of these changes are brought about through 
the agency of the sympathetic nervous system. This 
is a part of what is known as the ‘involuntary’ or 
‘autonomic’ nervous system, which looks after our 
vegetative life and sees to the co-ordinations required 
in order that our internal organs shall work together. 
It is partially independent of the central or ‘vol- 
untary’ nervous system which we discussed in Chap- 
ters III-V; but the degree of this independence is 
disputed. The supplementary diagram in Figure II 
shows the relationship between the spinal roots and 
the sympathetic chain. 

The Sympathetic System. The involuntary system 
is composed of three sections. There is a ‘cranial’ 
section whence a nerve supply is distributed to the 
heart, lungs, stomach, and intestines, to the arteries 
of the salivary glands, to the muscles which con- 
tract the pupil of the eye and to the tear glands. 
Parallel to part of the spinal cord there are two 
chains of ganglia (one of these chains appears in Fig. 
II) running down parallel with the spinal cord, and 
distributing a nerve supply to these same organs; to 
the liver, spleen etc.; to visceral and peripheral 
arteries; to the smooth muscles which move the hairs; 
to the adrenal glands; perhaps to the skeletal 
muscles; and also to the colon, the bladder, the arter- 
ies of the external genitals, and the internal genitals: 


240 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


this nervous organization makes up the ‘sympathetic’ 
system. Thirdly, there is the ‘sacral’ section which 
supplies more directly this last set (colon, etc.). The 
cranial and sacral sections together are as a rule an- 
tagonistic to the sympathetic in their effects; their 
positive influence is spoken of as ‘vagotonic’, while 
that of the sympathetic is called ‘sympatheticotonic.’ 
Thus “the cranial supply to the eye contracts the 
pupil, the sympathetic dilates it; the cranial slows 
the heart, the sympathetic accelerates it; the sacral 
contracts the lower part of the large intestine, the 
sympathetic relaxes it; the sacral relaxes the exit from 
the bladder, the sympathetic contracts it.’* The re- 
lation between the two is thus somewhat similar to 
that between the nerve supplies to antagonistic 
muscles, flexors and extensors in the leg, for example, 
and there are probably arrangements for reciprocal 
inhibition in the brain. But the sympathetic usually 
wins in a struggle between them. The cranial and 
sacral sections in general promote fairly specific re- 
actions in the organs they serve; their neurones go 
directly to ganglia in or near to these organs: but 
the sympathetic system promotes very diffused and 
widespread reactions; the neurones which leave the 
spinal cord go to ganglia close to it whence diverge 
other (‘post-ganglionic’) fibers in all directions. 

One further point should be mentioned to make 
this sketch sufficiently complete for our purposes. 
Among the organs supplied by the sympathetic system 
alone are two small bodies in front of the kidneys, 

* Cannon, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage, p. 34. 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER 241 


the adrenal glands to which reference was made 
above. These secrete and discharge into the blood- 
stream a substance known as adrenalin which, in 
extraordinarily minute amounts, has, when carried 
by the blood to organs innervated by the sympathetic, 
precisely the same effect as if they were receiving 
nervous impulses from the sympathetic. By this 
mechanism the power of the sympathetic is enor- 
mously increased. But adrenalin produces other 
effects as well, of which the most important is a 
facilitation of the supply of fuel to the muscles and 
of the rebuilding of chemical compounds broken 
down in muscular work. Thus this liberation of 
adrenalin through the action of the sympathetic ex- 
plains both the increased exertion possible in emo- 
tional excitement and the reduction of fatigue. 

We rarely appreciate the extent and complexity of 
the autonomic reactions that are constantly occurring 
in our normal daily life. In sudden emotional 
shocks, they are fairly evident; but it is not easy to 
realize that our internal organic economy undergoes 
marked variations as our gaze wanders from the 
clouds to the daisies on the lawn. If the subject be 
suitably connected with a galvanometer it is found 
that his resistance varies with changes in his affective 
condition. This gives us a new and very delicate 
method of exploring his emotional reactions. The 
emotional effects of colors and musical notes, so dif- 

*See Whately Smith, The Measurement of Emotion (1922), for 


a recent discussion of the problems raised by this ‘psycho-galvanic 
reflex,’ based on 45,000 observations. 


242 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


ficult to explain, must probably be traced to these 
reflex organic resonances. In fact, as the subtler, 
less easily described effects of our surroundings upon 
consciousness show, this ever-present background of 
organic sensibilty (the coenzsthesia, as it is called) 
is one of the most important factors in our lives. 
It is the basis of our feelings of familiarity and 
strangeness, and plays a great part in orientating us 
in all our daily affairs. Violent disturbances of it, 
due to gross physiological causes, seem to have much 
to do with some forms of insanity, in which the 
patient may complain, for example, that he is made 
of glass or full of frogs, and spend much time en- 
deavoring to explain his strange state by many 
extravagant suppositions and beliefs. It has been 
suggested further—for example, by Smith Ely 
Jelliffe—that electrical, climatic, or other influences 
may act directly upon the autonomic system, so 
that it can be regarded as a “receptor and transformer 
of cosmic energy.” * 

Criticism of the Theory of Organic Resonance. 
We can now return to the Lange-James hypothesis. 
This was that the emotions, at least the coarser of 
them, were made up of the effects in consciousness of 
these changes in the working of the organs brought 
about by the involuntary nervous system and princi- 


pally by the sympathetic. The perception of the 


* Dr. Crookshank comments upon this: “His suggestion is a bold, 
valuable, and illuminating one. It gives us a physiological link be- 
tween man and the universe,” apart from the ordinary senses. IJn- 
fluenza, Essays by Several Authors, p. 505. 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER 243 


alarming object, in the case of fear, activates the 
sympathetic through its connections with the central 
nervous system; and the resultant changes reported 
through the afferent channels of the central volun- 
tary system in the form of organic sensations were 
supposed to make up the body of the emotion. 

It must be acknowledged that these organic sensa- 
tions do make up a good deal of our experience in 
emotion. On the other hand, there are reasons for 
denying that they form the whole emotion or that 
the differences between our various emotions can be 
traced to differences in these organic reverberations. 
In the first place, the organic changes taking place 
in all violent emotions are very similar. Rage and 
fear have similar organic conditions, and these again 
are hardly distinguishable from those elicited by in- 
tense pain. Yet as experiences the three are 
markedly different, though less so as they grow more 
intense. James himself limited his theory to these 
coarser emotions. The subtler, more intellectual 
emotions “affect us with a pleasure that seems in- 
grained in the very form of the representation itself, 
and to borrow nothing from any reverberation 
surging up from the parts below the brain.”* He 
considered, however, that they might gain a rein- 
forcement, an added brilliance and solidity, from 
these secondary sources. 

But there is, even for the coarser emotions, some 
evidence against organic sensations as the essential 
constituents. This comes from two sources: experi- 


* Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, p. 468. 


244. THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


mental physiology and clinical observation. A puppy 
only nine weeks old continues to show signs of emo- 
tional excitement even after its brain is disconnected 
from all the body except the head and shoulders.* 
In older dogs we might suppose that images or other 
cerebral representations of visceral changes were in 
action, but in so young a puppy this seems improbable. 
On the other hand, we have no proof that the puppy 
feels any emotion; we only know that it acts as 
though it does. But it might well do so without any 
consciousness at all. The other evidence is that hu- 
man patients whose spinal cords have been divided 
so that their bodies are completely paralyzed and 
insensitive, may retain their whole emotional range 
and show no abnormalities.” But here representa- 
tions of former visceral reverberations may well be 
sufficient. Neither kind of evidence, then, is con- 
clusive. 

The result of this discussion is that the distinctive 
features which make an emotional experience so 
totally unlike any non-emotional experience are 
probably due to organic reverberations, and to 
representations of the effects of such reverberations 
in the past. We can feel an emotion without any 
visceral disturbance, but this is only because we have 
formerly undergone these disturbances; and the 
subtler emotions may differ from the coarser in be- 
ing composed of imagery rather than sensations. So 
far, then, the Lange-James hypothesis may be ac- 


*Cannon, of. cit., p. 281. 
*J. MacCurdy, The Psychology of Emotion (1925), p. 51. 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER 245 


cepted, but we should not conclude that these organic 
disturbances and representations of them are the 
whole story of an emotion. There is much more to 
be added. 

The Disguise of the Organic Response. One im- 
portant addition is fairly obvious. In an emotion the 
organic disturbance is not necessarily recognized for 
what it 1s. Or to put it the other way round, when 
it is recognized the emotion is changed and, it may 
be, dissipated. Most people have noticed the brusque 
transition from an emotion to a neutral awareness 
of gooseflesh, trembling, sickness, breathlessness, and 
so on, which sometimes happens. It is a common- 
place that we can show all the signs of fear without 
actually experiencing fear, the emotion. We may 
note the signs ourselves and say: “How curious! I 
seem to be afraid, but I am not.” A good instance is 
a sudden ‘appalling’ noise which we recognize in- 
stantly as nothing that we need bother about. Shortly 
afterwards the whole organic reaction ensues, with 
its leaping pulse, its shivers down the backbone, and 
the rest of it. But then these phenomena appear as 
what they are and have no tinge of the genuine thrill 
of fear. Certain bad actors and actresses in particular 
can cause us violent visceral perturbations, yet we 
remain emotionally quite unmoved. 

Projection. A great deal of our experience under- 
goes, as it occurs, a peculiar and very important 
transformation. Instead of seeming to be where its 
neural counterpart is, it appears from the first to be 
out in the external world whence the stimulus to 


246 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


which it is due originates. Visual objects and ordi- 
nary sounds, for example, we irresistibly locate 
outside us. This process is known as projection. 
But very low or very shrill noises may seem in com- 
parison to be in the ear, and the pain of a pin-prick 
is very definitely in us, not in the pin. No projection 
takes place. Intermediate cases occur with percep- 
tions of warmth and cold. Sometimes it is we who 
are hot, sometimes the sun... An especially interesting 
case is that of movements. A dizzy man with eyes 
open sees the world revolving, with eyes shut he 
himself revolves. Now it has been pointed out, by 
Lipps and others, that very much of our perception 
of forms, notably of architectural forms, involves 
projection either of slight movements of our own or 
of images of such movements. Thus a mountain rises 
and a steeple soars. Actually we do not doubt that it 
remains stationary, but our projected movements lend 
it a curious and important appearance of life and 
movement. This special form of projection is known 
as Empathy or Einfiihlung. 

The difference, then, between an emotion and a 
mere organic disturbance is in part in the degree of 
projection. Chimpanzees, we saw, when in emotion, 
tend to do something, no matter what, in the direc- 
tion of the object which has moved them. It is 
reasonable to take this as a sign of projection. In 
ourselves, emotions are nearly always projected. We 
think of the emotion which a picture causes us as a 
character of it, namely its beauty, much as we assume 
the perception of red which it may cause in us to be 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER 24.7 


a redness in some part of it. In the same way we 
tend, unless very sophisticated, to regard all the 
objects of our emotions as possessing qualities which, 
when we look more closely into the matter, we find 
to be merely projections of our own reactions. Such 
qualities are nobility, splendor, niceness, ugliness, and 
rhythm. Sometimes, as in these cases, we have in- 
dependent names for them. Sometimes we use 
names which derive from the names of our reactions 
—pleasant, disgusting, charming, hateful, appalling. 
In both cases the fact of projection makes an im- 
mense difference to our response, not only as an 
organic reverberation, but in the ways in which we 
behave towards the object. 

Incipient Action. Besides the organic discharge, 
or the representation of it, there is in every emotion 
another set of effects. The perception which gives 
rise to the emotion instigates a process of preparation 
for action. We have only to watch a baseball crowd 
to see how at every crisis the spectators more or less 
unwittingly get ready themselves to do what they 
hope will be done. And even when we cannot act- 
ually observe these preliminary settings of the 
muscles for action there is reason to suppose that 
very extensive processes of preparation take place at 
higher levels. These higher level settings, totally 
different in the case of fear and rage, for example, 
seem very largely to make the difference between 
the emotions; for they govern our responses and, 
when we do not go so far as overt action, they are 
our response. Thus the difference between being 


248 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


frightened and being made merely to quiver may be 
largely a matter of the extent to which our response 
develops. 

Conflict and Emotion. But here we come across a 
striking fact which again shows how complex emo- 
tional phenomena must be. When our response is 
complete, instantaneous and unimpeded, we have no 
emotional experience at all. We step out of the way 
of a car without a qualm. _When we know what to 
do and can do it at once we feel nothing. And this 
is so even when the chances of destruction remain 
very high. So long as there is something definite to 
be done we are free from fear. And to a large ex- 
tent this is so with all the emotions. The lover’s 
agitation takes on a much more moderate tone as soon 
as he is assured of acceptance. The Corsican bandit 
in the bush sights his piece at an enemy with a dispas- 
sionate eye, being assured both of escape and of 
approbation. It seems certain that some degree of 
conflict between rival tendencies, rival responses to 
the situation, is required for the full development 
of emotion. The experience of all who are familiar 
with dangerous situations, notably the experience of 
the soldier, is conclusive as regards fear. So that 
McDougall is not quite correct in dismissing, as 
merely “a curious dogma,” * the opinion that a con- 
flict of tendencies is involved in all emotion. 

Pathological emotions strongly support this con- 
clusion. Most people have known fears, angers, 
attractions, feelings of tenderness, of wonder, of be- 


* An Outline of Psychology (1923), p. 329. 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER 249 


wilderment, and of gaiety, which seemed quite 
ungrounded and inexplicable in view of the facts of 
the situation. And though some of these emotional 
moods are more easily accounted for, as due, for 
example, to the weather or to an oncoming attack 
of influenza, the extreme emotional aberrations of 
neurotics can often only be explained as due to such 
mental conflicts; and frequently these conflicts can 
actually be discovered. A striking example can be 
taken from Morton Prince’s celebrated case of alter- 
nating personality or co-consciousness, ‘Miss Beau- 
champ.? The patient had a number of separate 
personalities, two of which concern us here, B I and 
B IV. 

“An emotion,” writes Prince, “apparently paradox- 
ical, would be aroused in B IV in connection with a 
strange person or place. . . . The memories of the 
experiences to which these emotions belonged were 
a part of B I’s life and could easily be recalled by 
her when the personalities again alternated and B I 
came into existence.”* But B I showed less emotion 
than B IV in connection with these experiences. In- 
numerable other cases might be instanced in which 
a morbid fear, due not to the actual present situation, 
but to forgotten experiences, is lessened or removed 
entirely when these experiences are brought to mind. 
Now what does this bringing to mind involve? 

The Unconscious. Here we are confronted by the 
problem of the unconscious. We have seen, however, 
that of all the processes which are occurring in our 


* The Unconscious, p. 387. 


250 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


brains at any moment, only a small part is accompa- 
nied by consciousness; and it seems but a natural 
supposal that the unconscious consists of the rest. 
There seem, further, to be no good reasons for 
thinking that these unconscious processes differ very 
greatly in themselves from those which are conscious. 
There must, of course, be some very important dif- 
ference, but what it is there is no means at present 
of knowing. Perhaps the best suggestion is that it 
is a difference, not in the nature of the processes, 
but in their systematic relationships. 

In these cases of pathological forgetting, when a 
hidden activity seems to be interfering with the main 
stream, notably by causing groundless emotion, and 
yet cannot be readily made conscious, the unconscious 
activity 1s said to be repressed. We shall discuss 
repression in the following chapter. Here we need 
only note that the repressing agent is probably the 
successful activity itself; though it is not necessarily 
aware that it 1s repressing anything. Repression is 
the inhibition or partial inhibition of one activity by 
another. The repressed activity is inhibited either 
because it is now, or has been at some past time, in- 
compatible with the inhibiting activity. If it were 
allowed free access to the final common paths we 
should be behaving differently. Our actual behavior 
cuts it out, but often the inhibition is incomplete; 
the repressed activity in part gets through, character- 
istically as groundless emotion, and if we are right 
in tracing emotion to a conflict of tendencies, it is not 
surprising that the emotion due to repressed tenden- 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER 251 


cies is often intense. But the emotional effects of 
the interplay of incompatible tendencies are far more 
varied than this account so far would suggest. The 
baffled tendency does not necessarily give conscious- 
ness the emotional tinge which it would evoke if 
allowed more freedom. A ‘forbidden’ activity which, 
if it were successful, would cause a predominantly 
pleasant emotion, may, when defeated, lead to an 
emotion of anxiety. It is as though the danger 
which it offers to the triumphant activities were the 
source of the emotion. And in fact these activities 
are, in the measure in which the repressed tendency 
is strong, in a state of insecurity. We may often 
misinterpret this sense of anxiety, supposing, for ex- 
ample, that it is due to the dangers of modern traffic 
when actually it springs from the partial success of 
Potiphar’s wife. 

The causes of our emotions are, it follows, not 
always so obvious as they often appear. It is a 
commonplace that joys spring from the temporary 
rout of distresses, and there is reason to suppose that 
this is true in a deeper sense. For the normal con- 
dition of the mind is one of strain, a great number 
of tendencies being with difficulty repressed. The 
characteristic condition of elation is one in which 
either a very complete momentary triumph of some 
group of impulses has taken place—possibly after a 
sudden resolve which may lead either to a conversion 
or to a debauch—or in which there has been a re- 
organization of the mind which gives hitherto 
repressed tendencies a2 new means of co-operating 


252 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


with their former opponents. In the one case a swing 
of the pendulum is taking place; in the other the 
pendulum has been rehung. 

Belief and Doubt. It remains to discuss two other 
topics which less evidently come under the heading 
of emotional phenomena. One of these includes be- 
lief, doubt, prejudice, and so forth; the other, 
deliberation, resolve, and the fluctuations of the will. 
As experiences all these are essentially emotional. 
We often say that a man holds such and such beliefs, 
is skeptical in such and such matters, or that he is 
bigoted, determined, irresolute, or changeable, when 
we do not thereby intend to describe his experience, 
but merely to indicate his typical ways of behaving. 
In these cases we are referring to the more or less 
permanent dispositions which determine what he will 
do, and these dispositions may operate without any 
awareness on his part. Many beliefs in this sense are 
formed without any feeling accompaniment. We 
saw in Chapter XI that cognition, feeling, and con- 
ation are not separable aspects of experience. Sim- 
ilarly, a disposition must be regarded as having the 
same three aspects, though which aspect is most 
prominent will, of course, vary with the whole state 
of mind. Some psychologists speak of conative dis- 
positions and cognitive dispositions as though they 
were quite independent facts of structure. This is 
a confusing usage due to the effects of an artificial 
and obsolete schematization. 

As dispositions our beliefs are unconscious, and 
since they may operate without our awareness we 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER 253 


find that many doubts and decisions are also uncon- 
scious. But when we analyze the states of con- 
sciousness known by these names we find that 
the distinctive character of a crisis of belief or doubt 
is a feeling, of the same general kind as joy, for 
example, or fear, though unique in flavor. Expecta- 
tion, bare assent, and familiarity are examples of 
such belief-feelings. They are generally less intense 
than emotions, although pathological forms of doubt 
and ecstatic belief are not infrequent. Both seem 
able to occur in cases where there is nothing definite 
which is either doubted or believed. In the nitrous 
oxide and mescal exaltations, for example, anything 
can be believed to a degree of intensity which quite 
overshadows waking conviction;* and in doubting 
manias everything can be doubted. The patient may 
sometimes even doubt whether he exists. 

It may be added that the intensity of the belief- 
feeling is no criterion of the permanence of the dis- 
position which it leaves behind. Many people who 
experience the most intense beliefs are also the most 
changeable and instable in their convictions. As a 
rule in such cases and in normal life, the belief or 
doubt feelings are very subtly interwoven with the 
other emotions. We rarely believe strongly unless 
some emotion—it may be joy or fear, pride or hu- 
mility—is reinforcing the belief. And doubt, more 
evidently, perhaps, is commonly dependent upon a 
prior clash of interests and a resultant emotion. 


Cf, Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (1925), pp. 
27) 274-275. 


254 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


But if these intellectual feelings spring from 
other emotions they also give rise to them, since they 
modify so fundamentally the course of our responses. 
Strong belief is almost always the sign of the triumph 
of some important interest. It may be a grounded 
triumph in the case of a Galileo and his pendulum, 
or an ungrounded triumph as with an inebriate and 
his lamp-post. Even skepticism is for many people 
a source of infinite ironic delight. 

Deliberation and Resolve. The experiences of de- 
liberation and resolve are plainly very similar to 
beliefs and doubts. Doubt is a special form of irres- 
olution. We may, it is true, ‘make up our minds’ 
and form a resolve without any definite belief, either 
that we are following the best course or that the 
situation requires it; but supporting beliefs very com- 
monly develop. And such beliefs, when they are 
due to our being already involved in a line of action 
with a certain amount of our energy and time in- 
vested in it, rather than to evidence, are typical 
prejudices. As we shall see in the next chapter, the 
majority of our prejudices are unconscious; whence 
the notorious difficulty of proving to anyone that 
he is prejudiced. 

The Sentiments. The majority of adult emotions 
arise only in connection with what are known tech- 
nically as the sentiments. A sentiment is a group 
of interests organized around a set of objects or ideas. 
Typical instances are friendships, antipathies, the 
self-regarding sentiment, and the sentiment of 
patriotism. The interests making up a sentiment may 


EMOTION AND CHARACTER O55 


be very varied and thus the result of any promise or 
threat to one of them will not be uniform, but will 
depend upon the momentary condition of the others. 
The sentiments are for the most part made up of 
the conscious interests. The others are unconscious 
because they have failed to fit in with any of our 
avowed sentiments—do not help, as it were, to form 
a sentimental gestalt. Hence the unconscious inter- 
ests tend to be isolated and comparatively chaotic. 
Sometimes, however, a conflict between sentiments, 
common in childhood, may occur. Then, if the 
rivalry cannot be solved by a reorganization of one 
or other or both of them, a whole group of interests 
may be repressed. Such repressed sentiments, and 
sentiments which in general are out of accord with 
the main body of sentiments which makes up the 
character, are known as complexes. With these we 
shall be more concerned in the following chapter. 


CHAPTER XV: HOW THE MIND GOES 
WRONG 


Character and the Unconscious. By a man’s ‘char- 
acter’ at any time we may mean either his dominant 
sentiments and beliefs or the whole system of all 
his sentiments and complexes, conscious and uncon- 
scious alike, the entire organization of his dispositions. 
This last is perhaps better named his personality. 
Obviously in both senses character changes, but in 
the narrower sense the changes are apt to be partic- 
ularly sudden and bewildering. Change a man’s 
social environment and he will often behave like 
another man. 

It is clearly impossible to describe or even to 
mention all the multitudinous strands which make 
up a character. Yet by taking only one of the main 
strands and studying its origins and vicissitudes we 
can gain an insight into the ways in which the whole 
vastly more complex system develops. And for this 
purpose we may take with advantage the most 1m- 
portant set of trends in human personality, the sexual 
interests. They are also the interests about which in 
recent years most has been learned. 

Sudden advances in knowledge usually have their 

*A discussion which brings out the physiological and psychical 
bases of character particularly well will be found in Personality, by 
Dr. R. G. Gordon (1925). It contains also one of the least biased 
accounts of the varieties of psycho-analytic theory which have yet 


appeared. 
256 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG 257 


dangers. A new principle of explanation for a time 
throws older hypotheses into shadow. It is not sur- 
prising, then, if certain psycho-analysts have rather 
overworked their explanations, which, although de- 
veloped chiefly in connection with morbid conditions 
of mind, have succeeded none the less in revealing 
a great deal about human nature of which good self- 
observers were already aware. “Forgetfulness,” 
wrote Nietzsche in 1886, “is no mere vis inertia, 
as the superficial believe; rather is it a power of 
obstruction, active, and, in the strictest sense of the 
word, positive . . . a very sentinel and nurse of 
psychic order, repose, and etiquette.” * 

Six years later appeared the first works of Freud 
in which the theory of repression and transformation 
was given definite shape. Forel in 1874 had proved 
the suppression and transformation of instincts in 
ants, but Freud contended that the suppressed instinct 
may discharge itself in other forms, and may con- 
tinue to exhibit itself either in a ‘neurosis’ or in a 
‘sublimation’—.e., a socially approved form of ac- 
tivity. 

The Mutual Obstruction of Interests. Colloquially 
we say of a man suffering from a mental disorder 
that ‘he is all tied up in knots inside,’ and this com- 
parison does faithfully represent what in fact has 
happened. Psycho-analysis, in fact, is essentially a 
‘jam-probe.’” His interests (and we must remember 

*Cf. Prof. C. Baudouin, “The Evolution of Instinct from the 


Standpoint of Psycho-analysis,” Psyche, vol iii, 1922, p. 5. 
* Anglicé, ‘an inquiry into traffic congestion.’ 


258 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


that an interest is an activity springing from a need) 
instead of allowing smooth and clear passage to one 
another are in some way mutually obstructive. The 
working of one is hindering that of others and, it 
may be, involving activity in others which has nothing 
to do with the situation and is out of place. 

We saw, in describing the growth of the child’s 
mind, that it begins as a system of interests which 
are very unlike those with which it concludes as a 
healthy adult. We saw that the infant’s view of the 
world is a reflection of his interests, and the adult’s 
reflection of his. The immense difference in their 
world pictures corresponds to an equal difference in 
their interests. Now the most extensive and the 
most abrupt of the changes in interest occur in early 
years. Hence the stress which Freud has rightly 
laid upon infantile experience as a determining cause 
of later mental life. And further, the most im- 
portant of the child’s interests, and of the adult’s, 
are those which make up the system governing his 
relations to other human beings. And since he 
grows up from complete dependence to partial free- 
dom, all the while in peculiarly close contact with 
his parents, there 1s nothing surprising in the view 
that the kind of interest he takes in them and the 
way this interest changes will have a great influence 
upon his later life. 

The Freudian Theory of Sex. What was surpris- 
ing and gave the world in general a beneficial shock 
was Freud’s persistence in regarding these interests 
as sexual. To understand both view and shock 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG _ 259 


we have to remember that the components or germs 
of a later interest need not be identical with it. 
Freud saw this, but his alarmed and disgusted critics 
did not. Instead of assuming that sexual interests 
appear suddenly from nowhere about the time of 
adolescence, Freud declared that they were composed 
of trends which had a continuous history from birth. 
Naturally enough, early sexual activities differ 
markedly from later, but, according to Freud, their 
later trends are determined very largely by this 
early history and particularly by the precise ways in 
which the early interests become changed into the 
later. 

We saw (in Chapter X) that according to Watson 
a very wide range of ‘love’ phenomena—crowing, 
chuckling, smiling, affectionateness, etc.—is elicited 
in the very young infant by patting and stroking it. 
We saw too, (in Chapter VII) that the sexuality of 
Kohler’s chimpanzees was a much more indefinite 
affair than adult man’s. Any considerable emotional 
disturbance * tended to produce marked signs of sex- 
ual excitement and this was so with young apes by 
no means mature. One possible explanation of this 
‘overflow’ was also touched upon above, in a discus- 
sion of chronaxy (Chapter III). Thus a set of 
unquestionably sexual interests is present from birth 
and gradually extends, multiplies, and makes more 
definite its responses and becomes attached to wider 
and more definite ranges of situations. These trends, 
originally separate and diffused, later become unified 


1 Cf. also Freud, Collected Papers, vol. ii, p. 259. 


260 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


in the definite sexual character of the adult, who 
may, therefore, according to the history of this 
gradual unification, vary very greatly in his sexual 
make-up. The Freudians have been led largely 
through the study of certain eccentricities in adults 
to point to particular infantile situations as the origins 
of special sub-trends in later life. For example the 
infant’s acts of evacuation, which, as all mothers 
know, assume great importance in his sight, may, ~ 
through their special sexual interest, later influence 
his attitudes to gifts and to money. This is the 
Freudian explanation of the miser’s love of gold.’ 
And the same kind of stage-to-stage transference 
(a fundamental conception in psycho-analysis as in- 
deed in all psychology, since it is only substitution 
or conditioning seen from another angle) would ex- 
tend the infant’s original love of touching and being 
touched (handling and being handled) into the de- 
light so many find in ordering their lovers about 
(sublimated sadism) or being ordered about by them 
(sublimated masochism.) Similarly with the child’s 
passion for displaying himself and for looking at 
others. 

The Complexity of Sex. Of course these germs 
may be developed in many different ways and the 
task of tracing the vicissitudes of their growth is 
highly intricate. On the multiplicity of the infantile 
sexual components and on the ways in which a dis- 

* There are, of course, many steps and turnings in such a trans- 


ference. A lucid account of the child’s growth will be found in 
J. H. van der Hoop, Character and the Unconscious, chap. iii. 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG 261 


ordered development can affect later life, Freud 
himself may be quoted, if only as a contrast to cur- 
rent emotional reactions. ““We are faced by a fact; 
and it is to be hoped that we shall grow accustomed 
to it when we have put our own tastes on one side. 
We must learn to speak without indignation of what 
we call the sexual perversions—instances in which 
the sexual function has transgressed its limits in 
respect either to the part of the body concerned or to 
the sexual object chosen. The uncertainty in regard 
to the boundaries of what is to be called normal 
sexual life, when we take different races and different 
epochs into account, should in itself be enough to cool 
the zealot’s ardor. . . . Each of us in his own sex- 
ual life transgresses to a slight extent—now in this 
direction, now in that—the narrow lines imposed 
upon him as the standard of normality. The per- 
versions are neither bestial nor degenerate in the 
emotional sense of the word. They are a develop- 
ment of germs all of which are contained in the 
undifferentiated sexual predisposition of the child, 
and which, by being suppressed or by being diverted 
to higher, asexual aims—by being sublimated—are 
destined to provide the energy for a great number 
of our cultural achievements. When, therefore, 
anyone has become a gross and manifest pervert, it 
would be more correct to say that he has remained 
one, for he exhibits a certain stage of inhibited de- 
velopment.” * 


1 Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, vol. iii, p. 62. 


262 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


The CEdipus Complex. The most important of all 
cases of transference concern the parents. This 
brings us to the much-discussed problem of the 
CEdipus Complex. For the little boy and girl alike 
the two pillars of the world, the all-important centers 
of the majority of interesting situations, are the 
father and mother. At first the mother naturally 
takes first place for both. The very young child’s 
affections are set on the mother as soon as they are 
systematized enough to be able to be set on anything. 
This may be originally because she bathes it, kisses it, 
and rocks it most, thus giving it the major groups 
of the stimuli which elicit infantile sexual responses. 
We must not, of course, suppose that the child thinks 
this out, thoueh a rudimentary kind of working it 
out ates seem to goon. The child’s mental processes 
are so much simpler and more concrete than our own 
that any clear intelligible account we give of them 
will misrepresent them. If we remember this and 
translate the verbalized thought which alone can be 
used for communication into a far simpler, partly pic- 
torial but chiefly emotional, fabric, we shall escape 
many misapprehensions. The child’s life is a tissue of 
longings, of wants, satisfactions, and unrests, rather 
than of thoughts as we know them. It is nearer 
our dream and daydream existence than our waking. 

Projection and Introjection. The mother’s (or 
nurse’s) predominance does not, of course, last for 
long. The father and any brothers and sisters there 
may be come into the picture and the job of rec- 
onciling and adjusting the multitude of different 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG 263 


interests which arise becomes very complex. It will 
help us to understand this process if we remember 
what was said in Chapter VIII about the lack of 
fixity in the distinction, as the child makes it, between 
himself and the outside world. He easily regards 
both what happens in him as happening outside him 
(Projection, as the analysts call it) and what happens 
outside as happening in him (Introjection). The 
boundaries of his self are not yet established. His 
thoughts of his father and mother are not and cannot 
yet be clearly marked off for him from his father 
and mother themselves, and his interest in them is 
predominantly selfish. But at the same time their 
behavior and the differences between them give him 
all the patterns for his own activities, and in working 
out these patterns he both projects and introjects 
continually. He sees himself in them and he finds 
them in himself. There is nothing in the least sur- 
prising, then, if we find him, as we do, constantly 
behaving to his father as his mother does and to his 
mother as his father. 

The Riddle of the Sphinx. The C&dipus complex 
is the name for a particular system of these activities. 
CEdipus in the legend, after guessing the riddle of 
the Sphinx, became a king and married the reigning 
queen who in fact was his mother. Freud believes 
that in the phantasies of every child (or rather in the 
wish-activities from which phantasies spring) this 
drama is reenacted. There comes a point when a 
boy wishes to replace his father in his mother’s affec- 
tions, and a girl wishes to replace her mother. And 


264 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Freud holds (which is the point at which opposition 
chiefly arises) that this wish may be very specific and 
definite.’ It varies in many ways, but chiefly with 
the degree to which the riddle of the Sphinx has been 
guessed. And this riddle is nothing else than the 
great problem, for the child, as to how he came to 
be born. This problem and its clue, the difference 
between the sexes, inevitably exercise every child 
enormously. There may be something to be said for 
keeping him ignorant once the desire for knowledge 
has been expressed on the ground that it gives him 
his first real training in scientific research, but these 
advantages are far outweighed by the distortions of 
his personality produced by an atmosphere of secrecy, 
and his own inevitable but wildly misleading theories. 
That he should appear to drop the subject may be 
convenient for bashful parents, but is really a bad 
sign. He should—and this is one of the most im- 
portant practical recommendations that it is possible 
for psychology to give—have his problem well 
ventilated for him and be given, not hurriedly as 
something unpleasant to be got over, but freely and 

* “Children who have never known their parents have it,” says 
MacCurdy. ‘Adults whose childhood was cursed by parental neglect 
and cruelty, in whom filial affection seems unthinkable, will also 
give evidence for these unconscious tendencies.” Of the Cidipus 
tendency MacCurdy adds: “Of such wide application is this princi. 
ple that I cannot conceive of anyone who has once found it of use, 
who has ever understood it, abandoning it”? (The Psychology of 
Emotion, p. 94). Another view is that the object of unconscious 
interest is an #mago—i.e., an idealized imagined parent, rather than 
the real one. Interesting light on the equivalent of the CEdipus 


complex in savage societies where mother-right prevails is thrown 
by Malinowski in Psyche, vol. iv, nos. 2 and 4 and vol. v, no. 3. 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG _ 265 


without poetic nonsense, all the data which he needs. 

The child’s crude theories (and no child is with- 
out them) of the differences between the sexes are 
particularly important. The boy, briefly, is proud of 
his possessions, and the girl rather resentful of 
what she regards as an unfair deficiency. By very 
natural analogies the boy may come to dread that he 
will some day suddenly be turned into a girl. This 
dread, and the resultant theories and phantasies to 
which it leads, is known as the castration complex. 
It may afterwards have startling consequences if he 
becomes predominantly attached to his father. Cer- 
tain threats sometimes used to children may favor 
this dread. In the girl, whose psychology is very 
much more obscure, perhaps because there has as 
yet been no feminine Freud, a different complex 
may develop, though one equally capable of playing 
a part in after life, an infantile sense of unfair 
treatment which may greatly strengthen all the other 
better grounded reasons which women may later have 
for a quarrel with the natural order of things. The 
castration complex, for the girl, appears as a notion 
or fear that she is but an imperfect man. 

Conflict and Repression. We come now to the 
problem of the interaction of all these queer interests 
as they become more specific. The life of a healthy 
child from birth until towards five years old may 
be regarded as a time of more or less independent 
development of its manifold sexual and other 
interests. But by growing severally more definite 
they are obviously heading for a time when they will 


266 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


interfere with one another. One of the chief clashes 
comes, according to Freud, at about five years 
over the Gdipus complex... We must not suppose 
that the boy (vice versa if a girl) is then merely in 
love* with his mother and anxious only that his 
father shall be dead (=vanished). At the same 
time he may be passionately attached to his father. 
And out of this contradiction trouble may arise. The 
child, however, has a vastly greater power of com- 
bining contradictory attitudes than the adult. 

What happens will largely depend upon how clear 
(in his sense, voz in our sense) his ideas are and how 
adequate to the actual facts they are. He has to 
find a set of attitudes towards father and mother 
which will work smoothly together. We can hark 
back with advantage to the idea of competition for a 
final common path which was discussed in Chapter 
III. The child’s interests (activities in which his 
ideas are incidents) have come into conflict. The 
full solution would be a reorganization in accordance 
with the facts of the world and society and based 
upon a recognition of these facts. But ordinarily,. 
of course, nothing of the kind happens, the struggle 
is far more limited. 

The whole situation is vastly complicated by yet 

* Whether in a sense closely analogous to the adult sense—Freud 
thinks this is frequently the case—or in some more incomplete and 
more primitive sense due to the distortions of its false theories or to 
specialization of some one of the components only of the as yet 
piecemeal sexual interest. Obviously one such component may be 
dominant in its love for its father and another in its love for its 


mother. When this is so conflict may be postponed and difficulties 
only arise later. 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG _ 267 


another very powerful interest, the child’s desire to 
be approved of. He has found out on innumerable 
occasions that direct expression of his more specifically 
sexual interests is unwelcome. Naturally enough 
(through introjection) those interests become un- 
welcome to himself. But they do not for this rea- 
son cease. To suppose so has been the immense 
mistake made by traditional moralists, in the nursery 
and in the professional chair. They continue, but 
make a compromise with the wider desire to be well 
regarded. What looks like a cunning form of de- 
ception then arises. The narrower interests have a 
large selection of ways in which they can be satis- 
fied. Some of them also satisfy the wider interest. 
If there are enough of these all is well; the others 
are simply discontinued and narrower and wider 
interests now merge in socially possible forms of 
expression. But the former ways may be opened 
again if for some reason these compromise conditions 
change. The same kind of compromise may occur 
between the rival claims in the CEdipus complex 
situation, but often such a solution is too difficult, or 
the parents may themselves make it too difficult 
either by over-indulgence or by ridiculous embarrass- 
ment. Then other temporary solutions have to be 
found. 

One common form is the repression of the interest 
either in the mother or in the father. This notion 
is fundamental; it is also the point at which meta- 
phors usually begin to become misleading. Repres- 
sion we have insisted is simply inhibition, the uni- 


268 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


versal phenomenon we considered in Chapter III. 
A repressed wish is a set of impulses cut off tempo- 
rarily or permanently from the final common paths. 
If permanently, two possibilities are open. It may 
find other outlets; or continue, since the need which 
is its source remains, to bombard the entrance to the 
common path whenever circumstances occasion the 
need. Frequently other outlets are found. We 
shall see later that many ailments which have no 
adequate organic cause, and are thus classed as 
‘psychical,’ are such outlets. But for the moment 
let us consider the other case, and let us turn our 
attention to the need, the source of the wish. This 
need itself is not a simple thing; it is already, even 
in a very young child, the result of a co-ordination 
of simpler needs. It may happen that whereas im- 
pulses from the whole up-to-date co-ordinated need 
cannot get through, impulses from the component 
needs can; then through a backwash influence the 
need reverts to an earlier stage of develop- 
ment, and we have what is known as regression. 
The child’s comparatively developed sexual interest 
is transformed to an earlier type. To a type, for 
instance, for which the difference between the sexes 
is no longer significant, it returns suddenly from a 
four-year-old stage to a one-year-old. 

Regression. This kind of catastrophe, for such it 
may be, involves both a lapse backwards of behavior 
and a reformation of ideas. For here, as always, 
the child’s understanding and its wishes are different 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG __ 269 


aspects of the same thing.’ But since not its whole 
mind, but only one out of its interests, has lapsed 
back, the common result is a widespread disorder, 
for some of its ideas which have been developed in 
the interests of its now lapsed interest are also in- 
volved in other interests which have not lapsed. 
Thus further conflicts arise. Partial and permanent 
regression, in other words, is a bad solution. Brief 
temporary regressions may, on the other hand, be 
very useful. The parent who can make them in 
his play with children is a great success. 

But there is another way in which repression (in- 
hibition) may influence the need. It may cause it 
not to regress, but to develop, and this is in fact the 
main source of the child’s curiosity and the develop- 
ment of his understanding. And there is yet a third 
way out of the difficulty. If the need is not very 
strong it may satisfy itself in phantasy in the place 
of action, but, since the plasticity of the play world 
is so much greater than that of actuality, the influence 
of the other interests which are barring out actual 
behavior is likely to transform it beyond any ordi- 
nary means of recognition. 

* And this interdependence of ideas and wishes explains the curious 
fact that regression leads to forgetting. To remember anything we 
need partially to reinstate the activity which was originally occurring, 
and when this activity is banned many of the ideas which formed 
part of it pass completely beyond the normal power of recall. Hence 
on the Freudian view the great difficulty for most people of recall- 
ing infantile experience. But, as we saw in Chapter VIII, there are 
other good reasons why infantile memories may be difficult to recall. 
It is very natural that Freud, having discovered a new principle, 


should be tempted to apply it too widely. That regression does cause 
blanks in memory is beyond doubt. 


270 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Mechanisms of the Unconscious. A repressed wish 
is usually described as being forced into the Uncon- 
scious, and it is often supposed to be active there in 
the same way as before, much as a submarine con- 
tinues as before when it dips below the surface. And 
between the Unconscious and the Conscious another 
department of the mind is supposed to intervene, 
namely the Fore or Pre-conscious, which in compli- 
cated ways helps to rule the relations between these 
domains. It must be realized that these divisions 
are merely conveniences introduced in order to make 
exposition more easy. As soon as we forget this they 
become inconveniences, in fact such a scheme is far 
too simple, and the real interactions of different 
interests are far too subtle to be described so simply. 
It is true that a repressed wish is not thereby 
abolished, yet we should not suppose it to continue 
unchanged by repression. What makes it appear to 
be unchanged is the fact that, later on, behavior may 
appear which is unmistakably activated by an exactly 
similar wish. ‘This, of course, is no proof of an 
underground persistence of the wish itself, any more 
than the return of Spring each year is a proof that 
she has been lurking in the soil throughout the 
winter. What persists in all cases is a certain pattern 
in the organization of the mind. If the need behind 
the wish persists and conditions once again allow 
this pattern to be used, the wish reappears all com- 
plete. But that is a very different thing from its 
having itself been striving for manifestation through- 
out the interval. For example, given strawberries, 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG 271 


I may at once wish for cream, but this does not mean 
that a wish for cream has been battering for months 
at the barred gates of consciousness and has now 
seized its chance. The point, as we can easily see, is 
that the specific need for cream only arose with the 
coming of the strawberries. But with many wishes 
that, unlike the wish for cream, unfortunately cannot 
be expressed, the equivalent of the strawberries is 
always coming. They are always being touched off 
either by cyclically recurrent organic states, or by 
patterns in the external stimulation which may be 
very hard to separate out and distinguish. And 
since other simultaneous needs and their resultant 
wishes are in possession of the appropriate final 
common paths, the wishes these needs give rise to 
can only find satisfaction either by reorganizing their 
needs backwards or forwards (regression or develop- 
ment) or by some kind of compromise with their 
rivals at the gateways to action. It is these com- 
promises which give rise to many of the phenomena 
of dreams, and in more serious cases to those dis- 
orders of the mind which are known as neuroses, 
as well as to innumerable more trifling oddities and 
mistakes in ordinary life. 

Compromises. Such compromises between con- 
scious wishes which interfere with one another are 
familiar to everyone. A man wishes to take a holi- 
day and also to get on with his work. If he can 
he takes his work with him and so combines the two. 
But conscious wishes are only those which are not 
in too direct conflict with the main systems which the 


272 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


individual is prepared to avow freely and has recog- 
nized as belonging to him. Certain sets of wishes 
he constantly hears acknowledged by others; his 
mechanisms of projection and introjection lead him 
readily to recognize these in himself. Others he will 
find acknowledged only in the best fiction; to these 
he will give a more private kind of recognition. But 
a swarm of others long ago came into direct conflict 
either with the wishes of parents and elders or with 
other avowed wishes of his own. These wishes are 
not conscious, and he may easily be quite unable 
to believe that he has them if to avow them would 
in any way upset his self-esteem, a matter which very 
early begins to turn upon the character of his avowed 
wishes, since to avow some wishes, but not others, is 
usually the highway to parental esteem. 

The compromises between conscious wishes are 
usually of a different type from those among the un- 
conscious wishes. Conscious wishes often, though not 
always, adjust themselves to one another in a rational 
way with due regard to time, place, the situation 
as a whole and the probable consequences. In com- 
parison, unconscious wishes often show a freakish dis- 
regard of all ulterior considerations and express 
themselves in a totally unreasonable fashion. The 
explanation of this is usually to be found in their 
history. For the unconscious wish, like the conscious, 
has its prototype in infancy, but unlike the conscious 
it may never have passed beyond the infantile stage 
of development. 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG 273 


Dream Analysis. The evidence for this is drawn 
largely from the study of serious mental disorders 
through the method of dream analysis. In the 
dream, or rather in one very frequent type of dream, 
we have a figurative sketch of the solution of a con- 
flict; usually this is an absurd solution, though some- 
times, as some notable scientific discoveries show, it 
may have value. Sleep has cut off the greater part 
of stimulation, and it has altered the whole scheme 
of waking inhibitions. Unconscious wishes aroused 
during the day, then find an opportunity for display- 
ing themselves. But conscious wishes, though greatly 
weakened, are also still active. The dream is a com- 
promise in which none of the wishes operating may 
be clearly revealed. It may be interpreted, asa rule, 
in many fashions, corresponding to the wishes in- 
volved. As everyone knows, it tends to be very 
rapidly forgotten; the conscious wishes reinforced 
by the waking situation soon make the recall of the 
compromise impossible. There is nothing particu- 
larly mysterious in this. We can cross a stream in 
a drought which is hopeless in normal weather, and 
there is no need to suppose any Censor who takes a 
partial nap with us and is caught off his guard in the 
dream, or baffled by the disguises of the unconscious. 
All this is mythological machinery for convenience 
of exposition. The dream is the product of a trans- 
action between conscious and unconscious wishes and 
the results during sleep are naturally very different 
from those during waking hours. 

The analysis of the dream consists mainly of 


274 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


allowing ‘free associations,’ as they are called, to come 
into the mind in connection with as many as possible 
of the recalled episodes and features of the dream. 
These associations are again compromises between 
conscious and unconscious wishes. They often show 
what seems an astounding power of recondite meta- 
phorical allusion on the part of the unconscious wish, 
as any study of dream analysis will show. But the 
most interesting feature of such dream analyses is 
the frequency with which infantile wishes repro- 
ducing infantile experiences enter into them. One 
reason for this 1s fairly clear and helps to explain 
why dreams occur at all. Being asleep in bed is one 
of the few among our activities (if we may call it 
such) which have continued unchanged since infancy. 
But there are deeper reasons. Most of the wishes 
which we consciously discountenance were first out- 
lawed in our childish days. They are new produc- 
tions of the old needs which had such a stormy his- 
tory long ago, the needs themselves being reinstated 
by recent situations—generally bearing a subtle re- 
semblance to our old emotional situations. Hence 
the great importance of the earlier handling of 
these situations in childhood. 

Transference. This reawakening of an old need 
by a situation which may have only a remote, or 
trivial, or purely schematic resemblance to the ancient 
problem is the work of that transference which we 
have already considered. It is through transference 
that all our triumphs come—and also most of 
our woes. Any and every metaphor, simile, or 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG 275 


analogy illustrates it. But whereas analogies and 
most similes usually bring out clearly the relevant 
point through which the transference is effected, 
metaphor—poetic metaphor especially—often leaves 
this point very obscure. So it is with the points of 
resemblance through which infantile needs are re- 
awakened in later life. For the child’s original 
classifications were very different from the adult’s, 
and his ways of thinking far less systematic than our 
own. Hence also the apparent incoherence of such 
dreams. 

The infantile need thus awakened, events tend to 
take the course originally taken. For example, a 
child for whom the C£dipus situation led to a clash 
between his love for his mother and his different love 
for his father may, when he grows up, have his 
infantile mother-love reawakened by some chance 
similarity to her in his wife—as judged, of course, 
by infantile standards. The effect of this will vary 
with the outcome of the original clash. In fact, a 
man’s outlook on the world and his attitude to other 
people, especially women, is largely determined by 
the manner in which the transference from the 
parents to the outside world, at school or in the ball- 
room, has been effected. Suppose that, as may hap- 
pen, his mother-love was violently repressed, giving 
place later to a sense of guilt and a horror * of any 

* This horror, it may be remarked, is a defense mechanism and a 
measure of the original strength of the wish. Psycho-analysts often 
write as though the energy of the wish were itself transformed into 


the repressing horror, the libido converted into its opposite, but this 
seems an unnecessary hypothesis. The horror may be merely a 


276 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


such idea. Then without his knowing anything about 
it his attitude to his wife may be seriously affected. 
In another man a similar awakening of a childish 
wish may, since the original course of its repression 
was different, lead not to depression, but to increased 
affection. 

The instance is relevant, for there is reason to 
suppose that the choice of mates is much influenced 
by transference from father and mother, and, since 
a very great proportion of mental troubles arise 
through maladjustment in mating, the prominence 
of the C&dipus complex in the psychology of the 
neuroses is explained. In normal people it is likely 
that this early crisis was less severe. 

Such in outline is the modern theory of the 
ways in which the mind goes wrong. The whole 
theory is in many quarters rejected.’ But its op- 
ponents sometimes show either ignorance and mis- 
conceptions of it or an emotional attitude towards 
it which suggest that their theoretical objections are 
in part rationalizations, to use a term which we shall 
explain in the following chapter. 

A number of cleavages have occurred within the 
ranks of psycho-analysts, and these schisms have led 
to much unnecessary acrimony. The three main 
schools—of Freud, of Adler, and of Jung—tend 
too much to regard their accounts as incompatible. 


memory of the original disturbance of the triumphant wishes. If 
the banned wish is still active, the horror will of course be all the 
greater. 

*The most elaborate recent attack is that of Wohlegemuth. 


HOW THE MIND GOES WRONG 277 


But just as there may be for a dream a number of 
different but equally good interpretations, so it is 
with all psychical products and phenomena. We are 
not yet within several centuries of a complete 
account, and meanwhile any clue which in any way 
helps to unravel the maze should be followed up. 

Organ-inferiority. Adler’s distinctive treatment 
sets out not from the sexual interests, but from what 
Freud regards as the other main group—the Ego 
interests. [hese other interests, built up round the 
child’s desire for power and reflecting themselves in 
his ambitions, undergo a process of development 
corresponding in broad outlines to the processes we 
have sketched. For Adler the key to character 
lies in the association of what he has named ‘organ- 
inferiority’ with a ‘superiority’ aim (ambition). A 
defect of which the child is sensible leads him to an 
effort at compensation, sometimes successful—as in 
the case of Napoleon, who complained later that 
he always felt like ‘a boiled fowl’ at home, where 
he was bullied by the family. But sometimes the 
compensation, the desire to obtain power in other 
ways, may be disastrous. The typical instance is that 
of the ‘malade imaginaire,’? who, failing to make 
himself or herself felt in ordinary life, contrives to 
turn the rest of the family into a nursing staff. The 
instance brings out the important point that there 
is no hard and fast line to be drawn between 
malingering and mental illness. As Crookshank 
writes, “Where there is a will not to do, there is 
always a way of escape from doing what should be 


278 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


1 


done. Most people have plenty of weak spots 
physically and plenty of awkward problems of 
mental adjustment, and the tendency to dodge the 
latter by stressing the former provides a large part 
of every medical practice. 

Moral Re-education. This insistence upon the pres- 
ent problem, as opposed to Freud’s insistence upon 
infantile problems, is in a large measure Jung’s con- 
tribution to psycho-analytic theory. His famous 
theory of Types and his doctrine of the Collective 
Unconscious give rise rather to speculation than to 
positive results. Jung sees in many, indeed in most, 
mental disorders what amounts to a moral failure 
to meet the exigencies of life, which should be set 
right mainly by a re-education of the individual 
which aims at making him realize his duties and his 
work in the world. He is thus much more in line 
with traditional views of the function of the spiritual 
adviser than the other psycho-analysts, who, how- 
ever, are by no means blind to this factor in the 
situation. They reply that most people are only too 
well aware of what they ought to do and that the 
real problem is to discover why they cannot do it. 
On the other hand, by pointing out that failure to 
reach a decision, with its corollary, a Troubled Con- 
science, may be the unsuspected cause of ailments 
regarded as obstacles to such a decision, they can 
often set the pilgrim on the right track—back, it 
may be, to his own fireside. 


" Migraine and Other Common Neuroses (1925), p. 37. 


CHAPTER XVI: THE ABNORMAL 


The Borderland. Around the frontiers of the better 
established part of psychology lies a ring of debatable 
matters; sometimes these are treated as though they 
must involve quite new hypotheses and principles of 
explanation; sometimes an attempt is made to ex- 
tend the hypotheses already in use so as to include 
them. There are many who hold that these 
borderline phenomena—suggestion, hypnotism, tele- 
pathy, clairvoyance, and mediumistic happenings in 
general—will involve in the end a reconquest, as 
it were, of ordinary psychology by some form of 
Animism. The hypotheses needed to explain, for 
example, how a mind can act upon a distant mind 
(if it does) will, it is held) when they have been 
worked out, make ordinary orthodox psychology 
seem unduly timid. 

Unfortunately these exceptional phenomena 
which lie outside normal psychology are notoriously 
hard to observe. They inevitably remain too often 
at the stage of the remarkable anecdote. Full ver- 
ification and corroboration are rarely possible. A 
quite special criticism is required before they can be 
accepted as fact; and, in face of the great reserves 
which their extraordinary nature demands, and the 
difficulties as regards testimony and even mere ac- 
curate description, it is hardly surprising that so much 
hesitation should be felt by psychologists in ad- 

279 


280 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


mitting them as facts at all. We shall see that 
different classes of these phenomena stand in dif- 
ferent positions in this respect. And such a pre- 
liminary sorting out 1s almost all that psychology can 
at present do with them. 

Suggestion. We may conveniently begin with 
suggestion, since, although the more striking in- 
stances of suggestion are unquestionably abnormal, 
and in many cases not above suspicion as having been 
misdescribed and exaggerated, suggestion itself is a 
quite normal process which can be observed easily 
enough in ordinary daily life. 

In its widest sense ‘suggestion’ is merely another 
name for the working of mental processes in general. 
A stimulus would ‘suggest’ its response, and this, 
whether the stimulus be a perception, an idea, or an 
emotion, and whether the response be a movement, 
another idea, or a further emotion. In this sense 
the sight of a theater-bill ‘suggests’ a visit to the play, 
or a despondent mood ‘suggests’ a series of melan- 
choly reflections. But the sense of ‘suggestion’ 
prominent in recent discussion, for example in the 
agitation centering round the work of Liébault, of 
Bernheim, and of Coué, is narrower than this. Only 
those suggestions which take place primarily through 
the operation of unconscious processes are included 
in the narrower sense. Going to the play or indul- 
gence in gloomy prognostications is ordinarily under 
our own conscious control. They are voluntary 
activities, matters of the will; but sometimes we may 
find ourselves stepping through the theater doors 


THE ABNORMAL 281 


when we have strong reasons for being elsewhere, 
or we may harrow ourselves with thoughts which are 
the last we consciously wish to entertain. Such im- 
pulsions or obsessions are typical examples of the 
working of suggestion in this narrower sense. 

The most interesting field for suggestion is in the 
control of the bodily functions. As all who suffer 
from colds are only too well aware, we have very 
little conscious power of control over what takes 
place in the nasal passages. It is claimed by the 
Nancy School—and the phenomena of faith-healing 
also show it—that unconscious control may be very 
much wider. Not only functional disorders, but 
some organic conditions also can be corrected by psy- 
chological means. Warts, for example, it is said, can 
be cured in many cases with great ease by the recita- 
tion of an appropriate verbal formula. 

But the question arises, why are some suggestions 
effective and others not? The answer given by the 
Nancy School is that failure is due to the arousal of 
a counter-suggestion. They draw a very hard and 
fast line between the ‘Will’ and the ‘Imagination,’ 
using these terms in their popular sense. It will re- 
pay us to examine more closely the distinction. The 
‘will’ on this view, would appear to be the conscious 
operation of a particular interest or set of interests, 
whereas the “magination’—that is, the picturing or 
thinking of the end to be reached—allows a variety 
of unconscious wishes to take effect, and gives less 
occasion for conflicting wishes to interfere. A con- 
sciously formulated wish often seems to act as a 


282 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


challenge to any dissentients there may be in the 
personality, though in many cases, of course, such a 
wish is quite effective, a point which M. Coué does 
not sufficiently stress. It all depends upon the 
strength of the wish and the extent to which it is in 
conflict with other wishes, or, as Coué puts it, with 
the imagination: “When the will and the imagination 
are at war, the imagination invariably gains the day. 
In the conflict between the will and the imagination 
the force of the imagination is im direct ratio to the 
square of the will”? This metaphorical statement 
becomes more plausible when we realize that the 
“force of the imagination” is the force of the desires 
and interests to which the imagining is due. We 
must, of course, be careful in the examples we choose 
M. Coué’s favorite instance, the undesirability of 
trying, of making an effort, to go to sleep is clearly 
misleading, sleep being by the nature of the case a 
state in which effort must be absent. But when, as 
for example in getting up on a winter’s morning, 
effort is not antagonistic to the desire to seat oneself 
at the breakfast table, or even perhaps to reach the 
office before ten o’clock, the exercise of the will is 
salutary and successful almost daily; and this no 
matter how powerfully the imagination pictures the 
rigors of the frore morning air. 

Auto-suggestion. | [The controversy as to whether 
all suggestion is really auto-suggestion—e., 
whether all suggestion involves the intervention of 
our own imagination, or whether all auto-suggestion 
ultimately depends on suggestion from without— 


THE ABNORMAL 283 


would seem to be due to a common failure in syste- 
matizers to allow for the many ways in which the 
mind works. 

There is no doubt that suggestions of external 
origin gain added force when they ally themselves 
with auto-suggestions, and conversely an auto-sug- 
gestion will be the stronger if some authoritative 
utterance from a person of prestige—a doctor, a 
teacher, or a public idol—is co-operating. None the 
less these two processes may be regarded as distinct, 
though, of course, an external suggestion which 
elicits the support of no conscious or unconscious in- 
terest will lead to no response; whether this interest 
be an impulse to conform, or to obey—and Binet 
reduced all suggestion to obedience—to please the 
suggestor, or to be a satisfactory platform exhibit. 
The reason for distinguishing between them is that 
the motives operating in the two cases are usually 
diverse; with external suggestion they are largely of 
social origin. 

Hypnosis. This brings us to the problem of the 
influence of mind upon mind and the vexed question 
of hypnosis. About 1880 hypnotism emerged sud- 
denly, with the work of Richet and Charcot, from 
the period of opprobrium which followed the ex- 
cesses of Mesmer.’ For a while the most remarkable 
phenomena were recorded, including the transference 
of affections from one side of the body to another by 

* An absorbing account of the history of animal magnetism and 


hypnotism will be found in the two volumes of Janet’s Psychological 
Healing (1925). 


284 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


means of magnets, anesthesia, clairvoyance, etc., all 
leading to the conclusion that the mind could be in- 
fluenced from without by unknown forms of vibra- 
tion and radiation. But with the triumph of the 
Nancy School, which already in the ’eighties at- 
tributed everything to ‘suggestion,’ though without 
at that date giving any account of it, interest in 
hypnosis declined. It has generally been supposed 
that the hypnotizer works upon his subject by re- 
stricting the range of his attention, and that this 
narrowed field of concentrated attention allows the 
suggestion a free field for operation; while Freud has 
recently pointed out that fascination and infatuation, 
the extreme developments of being ‘in love,’ are but 
little removed from hypnosis.’ The effects of 
Rhythm in poetry, music, and the arts might also 
be brought under this heading. 

The most characteristic phenomenon of hypnosis, 
as its name implies, is the inducement of artificial 
sleep. Sir Michael Foster recorded a case where a 
man had no sense organ left save a single eye. 
He was half-blind, totally deaf, and insensible to all 
other stimuli. If anyone closed his remaining eye 
he promptly fell asleep.” The cutting off of the sole 
remaining field of attention left him no alternative. 
Another curious corroboration comes from the work 
of Pavlov. As we have seen (Chapter IV), the in- 
terval between a conditioned stimulus and the 
response (salivation) can be extended to as much as 


* Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922), p. 77. 
* Text-book of Physiology (1888), p. 1117. 


THE ABNORMAL 285 


half an hour. Now if the experiment be repeated 
without the food being given, there comes a stage 
when the conditioned reflex becomes quite inactive. 
“At the same time the animal enters into a kind of 
cataleptic condition; inert to stimuli, it assumes a 
particular pose and thus remains rigid, finally falling 
into a deep sleep from which it can only with dif- 
ficulty be aroused.” * The simplest interpretation of 
this result in psychological terms is that the dog’s 
field of attention is so narrowed down by inhibition 
that when what is left, namely his expectation of 
food, is inhibited, he passes into that state of total 
inhibition which is known as sleep. 

There are signs of a reaction against the view that 
hypnosis is only a phenomenon of suggestion. It 
was maintained by the late Dr. Alrutz on the basis of 
a number of ingenious experiments that passes, which 
used to be so prominent in the procedure of mes- 
merists and the early hypnotizers, do in fact play an 
essential part. After covering the subject’s head 
completely with a black cloth, and shielding his arm 
from currents of air, etc. by sheets of glass, he 
claimed to have induced by a few downward passes 
complete insensibility of the skin. Upward passes 
produced the opposite effect. Precautions against 
suggestion seem to have been taken.” 

Whatever may be the truth with regard to these 
contentions, some of the better established phe- 
nomena of the hypnotic state are so extraordinary 


* Pavlov, British Medical Journal, October 18, 1913. 
* Psyche, vol. iv, October, 1923; p. 129, ff. 


286 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


that the slight amount of work which is being done 
upon them is surprising. For example, very pro- 
found anzsthesia can in some cases be produced: so 
deep, in fact, that a number of surgeons, such as 
Esdaile and Elliotson in the years preceding the 
discovery of anzsthetics, employed hypnosis for 
this purpose. Even major operations—the removal 
of a leg, for example—were performed without pain 
by its aid, thought it has been held that there were 
less phenomena of hypnosis than of hysteria, while 
one writer went so far as to maintain that the patient 
was an “impostor” who had been “simulating” in- 
sensibility during the amputation. It seems probable 
indeed that had the discovery of chemical anesthetics 
been delayed a considerable development in the prac- 
tical use of hypnosis would have taken place. 
Hyperesthesia, Another well-authenticated phe- 
nomenon is what is known as hyperesthesia. The 
subject in light hypnosis quite usually displays 
powers of sensory discrimination much superior to 
those possible in the waking state. Instances are 
reported in which he is able to perceive distinctly 
the details in microscopic slides, and to overhear con- 
versations in remote rooms which would normally 
be inaudible, facts which would seem to show that we 
do not usually exploit our powers of perception to the 
full. Doubtless this hyperzsthesia has a bearing 
upon many alleged instances of telepathy. In this 
connection we may recall the controversy, still sud 
judice, between M. Jules Romains and the Sorbonne 
professors on the subject of ‘eyeless sight? M. 


THE ABNORMAL 287 


Romains claims to have discovered a power of read- 
ing through the skin, for which he gives an anatomi- 
cal and evolutionary explanation, and which may be 
revived in a suitable “régime of consciousness”—pos- 
sibly a form of mild hypnosis. Whether or not the 
facts are as described—and the late Anatole France 
was among those who vouched for some of them— 
the problems raised by the discussion are of unusual 
theoretical interest and should certainly be further 
examined.’ 

Post-hypnotic Suggestion. If during hypnosis it is 
suggested to the subject that at a fixed time after 
waking he shall perform some unusual act, for ex- 
ample remove his shoes and place them in the book- 
case, he will often perform the act at the appropriate 
moment without fail—showing incidentally a re- 
markably accurate appreciation of the lapse of time. 
When asked why he has done this he will usually 
give some more or less plausible and elaborate 
answer, bearing no relation to the real reason, known 
only to the experimenter. Such answers, known 
as rationalizations, throw a curious light upon the 
normal working of the mind, particularly in the 
matter of political opinion. 

Telepathy. The evidence for the influence of 
mind upon mind independently of the recognized 
channels of sense has long been accepted by a suf- 
ficient number of trustworthy investigators to justify 
the scientific study which is now being devoted to 
it. The fact that such trained thinkers as Sidgwick, 


* Eyeless Sight, 1923. 


288 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


James, Forel, Freud, Driesch, Bergson, McDougall, 
Becher, and Broad, to name only a few of those 
who have actually written on the subject, are con- 
vinced of its occurrence makes the cavalier dismissal 
of its possibility no longer prudent. At the same 
time the clear possibility of as yet unguessed-at 
forms of physical transmission makes the acceptance 
of telepathy less difficult. We know too little about 
the nervous system to be sure that an event in one 
body may not produce a direct effect in another, even 
at a remote distance. No useful conjectures can yet 
be made as to how it should do so; but there certainly 
seems no reason to assert, for example, that special 
receptive organs would be required. The absence 
of such organs, then, is no good ground for a hasty 
return to the primitive hypothesis, the view, namely, 
that on exceptional occasions the soul, or a part of 
it, is able to leave the body and travel to distant 
regions. Nor is an acceptance of telepathy neces- 
sarily a step towards Animism. The aim of science 
is to give an intelligible account of what happens, 
and to speak in this connection of direct interactions 
between souls which transcend space or operate in 
supernumerary dimensions is not, unless something 
much more definite can be added, particularly 
profitable. Such accounts, although they may pro- 
vide a certain emotional satisfaction, actually bring 
us at present no nearer an understanding of the 
alleged phenomena. This is in fact a field in which 
a resort to words which have no definite significance 
is fatally easy. 


THE ABNORMAL 289 


Various other phenomena, for which the evi- 
dence is less satisfactory, are allied to telepathy 
and raise similar fundamental issues if they are ac- 
cepted. Such are clairvoyance and the prediction of 
the future. In the typical case of clairvoyance the 
subject, sometimes in a trance-condition, sometimes 
gn what appears to be a quite normal state, reads the 
contents of an opaque envelope which has been sealed 
‘with all possible precautions, or, as in the celebrated 
‘book tests,’ indicates the words or matter of a passage 
of print in some volume which has been set aside with 
others for the purposes of the experiment in a dis- 
tant house, after the most elaborate precautions have 
been taken to prevent any collusion. In this last 
instance it would appear that no one whatever knows 
which books have been set aside, yet the clairvoyant 
is reported as giving the gist of the passage she has 
selected sufficiently often to make the hypothesis of 
chance unplausible. In yet another kind of experi- 
ment the medium is handed some object whose 
history is unknown to all present; it is alleged that 
sometimes detailed accounts of episodes in which it 
has been concerned are given. To explain these 
phenomena by the hypothesis of telepathy would 
plainly involve something like a central pool wherein 
the knowledge of all men is stored, a pool whence 
the medium is able to draw her knowledge. But 
this is so desperate a conjecture that very much more 
stringent conditions would be required to establish 
such occurrences as facts than are required for more 
ordinary cases of telepathy. 


290 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Dissociation. The peculiarities of the trance con- 
dition which seems necessary for many mediums are 
an easier and at present more profitable subject for 
investigation. These trance states bear a close re- 
semblance to pathological conditions which have been 
studied by alienists in cases where these borderline 
phenomena are not in question. There is indeed 
little doubt that the mediumistic trance is a state of 
what is known as dissociation. The medium claims 
ordinarily to be ‘controlled’ by an independent per- 
sonality. It often appears to be that of a child. 
Now mild degrees of dissociation are not uncommon. 
Just as we can digest and at the same time learn to 
ride a bicycle, so when we have learned to ride we 
can continue on our way while arguing about birth- 
control. There is nothing pathological about this, 
but when the two streams of activity are such that 
one would normally inhibit the other, and the two 
cannot be combined into a coherent personality, an 
abnormal condition may arise. There is a surprisingly 
large number of people who, if they hold a pencil 
comfortably in their hand over a piece of paper, while 
reading a book or talking to others, find that after a 
little practice the pencil begins to move and write 
down more or less coherent script. This is known 
as automatic writing. A set of interests which has 
been repressed by normal consciousness is taking ad- 
vantage of this channel of expression. In extreme 
cases this dissociated set of interests is complete 
enough to make up a minor personality, and it may 


THE ABNORMAL 291 


be added that provision of the means of expression 
often favors the development of the disease. 

Facial Asymmetry. Many people who have never 
heard of ‘dissociation’ are aware that the faces of 
their friends are not the same on the right side as on 
the left; and discussion frequently arises.as to which 
side will come out best ina photograph. This facial 
asymmetry reflects a functional or structural asym- 
metry in respect of the twin cerebral hemispheres. 
Conversely, just as Elliot Smith correlates the 
asymmetry of prehistoric skulls (and so of prehis- 
toric brains) with right- and left-handedness,' so we 
may come to correlate similar brain asymmetries with 
right- or left-facedness in the matter of emotional 
expression. In extreme cases the disparity of ex- 
pression 1s very marked, and insanity is often in- 
dicated by a cocking of one eyebrow. In normal 
people both halves of the forehead muscle work to- 
gether, but in states of dissociation one half will 
work independently. Normally, too, the eyes are 
directed by the occipital lobes of the cerebral hemi- 
spheres after the manner of a pair of horses’ heads 
controlled as in Fig. XIII opposite; but squint may 
indicate dissociation of this curious faculty of con- 
jugate direction, and the imbalance involved may 
explain the distrust of many for people who squint 
as unreliable. Phrases such as ‘double-faced,’ ‘smil- 
ing on one side of the face,’ or ‘laughing on the 
wrong side,’ show a further recognition of this lack 
of co-ordination. So, popularly, when it is said in 


* British Medical Journal, November 14, 1925. 


292 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


France that ‘Le nez tourne,’ an accusation of duplicity 
is to be inferred. We may compare, too, the very 





Rt- Hemisphere. 


Fic, XIII 


Le. Hemisphere’ 


general interpretation of ‘winking,’ in which the other 
side of the face is kept solemn, as a sign of duplicity. 
The correlation of squint with left-handedness, and 








V 


Pate | 


THE ABNORMAL 293 


the possibility of their origin in some infantile re- 
action to thwarting by a heavy father, are now re- 
ceiving attention from oculists who are conversant 
with psychology.’ 

But the psychological bearing of asymmetry ex- 
tends to the whole personality. In civilized man 
the eft side of the brain (connected with the right 
side of the face and body) is usually the dominant 
hemisphere. Intellectual development (in right- 
handed people) depends on the potentialities and 
predominance of the left brain. The palmists ex- 
press this by saying that the right hand (governed by 
the left brain) reveals what the owner has accom- 
plished, while the left hand (governed by the right 
brain) shows his congenital equipment and inherit- 
ance. Hence when a man rises by his own efforts 
we may expect to see his origins revealed in the left 
side of his face, his accomplishments in his right. 

When two or more such personalities are unified 
(unilateral control) at a high level of development, 
we get the various forms of ‘genius’ which are as- 
sociated with versatility and synthetic achievement. 
Thus in the portrait of the distinguished writer on 
the opposite page—who is also one of the world’s 
greatest psychologists, though he finds it more profit- 
able to call his work fiction—the reader may imagine 
on the right hand side of the dotted line (the left 
side of the face) the penetrating humorist who 
created The Card, and on the other side the reflective 





See W. S. Inman’s contribution to Dr. Culpin’s The Nervous 
Patient (1924). 


294 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


artist whose Old Wives’ Tale remains a landmark in 
literature. Facial asymmetry of this type is usually 
combined with pronounced right- or left-handedness 
and those in whom it is most marked are often re- 
garded by their less wayward friends as unaccountable 
and disturbing—“you never know where you are with 
them.” A different type of genius is found, though 
very rarely, in unified personalities with complete 
facial symmetry, when both cerebral hemispheres are 
abnormally developed at a very high level: as for 
example in the well-known Stratford bust of Shake- 
speare. Perfect symmetry of face on a low level 
(the left side of the brain having failed to develop 
above the right) is seen in certain idiots, criminals, 
and ‘low-level ambidexters.? Moreover, in thalamic 
diseases hyper-emotivity will be expressed on the 
side of the lesion, whereas the other side of the face 
remains relatively quiescent.’ 

Alternating Personalities. A very striking form 
of dissociation may occur when the lack of co-ordina- 
tion between two or more mental systems (whether 
from + Left or — Right or some more complicated 
disorder) is so great as to result in what is known 
as alternating or dual personality; those fugues, or 
flights from reality, which occur in cases of hysteria. 
Certain drugs, notably alcohol and hashish, or the 
deep-breathing practices of the Yoga system, are 
artificial means of inducing them. A great part of 

*Cf. V. Gordon Holmes and Henry Head on thalamic overtoning 


(as this phenomenon is called), in “The Thalamic Syndrome,” 
Brain, 1910. 


THE ABNORMAL 295 


the technique of the religions of antiquity was de- 
voted to bringing about similar states, and to-day 
the trance medium is in many respects the lineal 
descendant of the Priestess of Apollo. In the trance 
the medium often utters strange cries, writhes and 
gesticulates. Raps and voices are heard in all parts 
of the room, and, strangest of all, physical objects 
are sometimes reported as moving, even with vi- 
olence, beyond the medium’s reach. Endeavors are, 
of course, made to control the movements of the 
medium/’s limbs, but the darkness or low illumination, 
and the hubbub that is usually declared to be es- 
sential, make any scientific judgment difficult. All 
that can be stated is that if such phenomena are genu- 
ine, physics, physiology, and psychology alike are 
very far from being able to explain them at present; 
whether their verification would invalidate any par- 
ticular view of the nature of the mind cannot, there- 
fore, be decided. In any case such séances provide 
a valuable field for a study of the psychology of 
belief and testimony. 

Calculating Boys. The unconscious is often re- 
garded as a source of all that is most marvelous in 
the mind. Certainly some of the performances of 
the very backward nine-year-old child Zerah Col- 
burn, who could instantly declare the factors of six 
figure numbers and extract cube roots without a 
moment’s hesitation, though entirely ignorant of 
the commonest rules of arithmetic, require a special 
explanation. When later on he discovered in part 
how the feat had been performed, the odd con- 


296 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


sequence was that he lost the capacity. Apparently 
at the age of six he had indulged in an enormous 
number of multiplication sums involving two figures, 
classifying the products by the last two digits. He 
then unconsciously remembered what numbers when 
multiplied together could yield products so ending. 
The power of finding factors and extracting roots 
seems to have depended upon this prodigious uncon- 
scious classification. G. P. Bidder, a calculator even 
more remarkable than Colburn, used similar methods, 
believed in multiplying from the left-hand corner, 
and never lost his capacity for lightning calculation 
in all forms. Two days before his death at the 
age of seventy-two the query was suggested that, 
taking the velocity of light at 190,000 miles per 
second, and the wave length of the red rays at 
36,918 to an inch, how many of its waves must strike 
the eye in one second? His friend, producing a 
pencil, was about to calculate the result, when Mr. 
Bidder said: “You need not work it: the number 
of vibrations will be four hundred and forty-four 
billions, four hundred and thirty-three thousand six 
hundred and fifty-one millions, two hundred thou- 
sand vibrations.” This number written in figures is 
444,43 3,6 51,200,000.” 

A different kind of calculator was Jedediah 
Buxton, whose memory for figures was amazing, 
though he never learned more than the simple multi- 
plication table. Though he was very slow and did 
little else in his whole life but multiplication, he 


* Hankin, Common Sense and How to Acquire It, 1925, p. 55. 


THE ABNORMAL 297 


failed to discover that the simplest way to multiply 
a number by 100 is to add 00. He talked freely 
whilst solving his problems, and could complete an 
unfinished problem three months later, taking it up 
where he left it. He remembered all the free drinks 
of beer he had had since he was twelve years of 
age and gave a list of them thus: 


D of Kingston 2,130 pints. 
D of Norfolk 200 
Duke of Leeds v3 a 
D of Devonshire TOan 4h 
Lady Oxford 280)" 
G. Heathcote, Esqr. LOQ7 ies: 
Sir G. Saville, Bt. BO0i ts 
etc. etc. 


and so on, amounting to 5,116 pints received from 
60 persons. 

Musical Prodigies. Another precocious capacity 
which has naturally attracted attention is musical 
genius. Most of the great composers were remark- 
able for their early musical development, and in 
many cases exhibited astonishing gifts of discrimina- 
tion and analysis. In his elaborate study of the 
powers of Erwin Nyiregyhazi, the Hungarian boy 
prodigy, Dr. Révész records his analyses of the three 
chords in Fig. XIV the first time they were played 
to him at the age of seven. 

The Inheritance of Genius. It is natural to inquire 
how far special capacities are due to inheritance and 
how far to early environment. But the usual 
antithesis between heredity and environment is no 


298 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


longer justified. Modern genetics has shown that if 
we could give the same education for many genera- 
tions to a number of different human families, we 
should find that the characteristics resulting from 
education are inherited characteristics in the same 
sense as are color of eyes and form of head. “Every 
creature,” adds Professor H. S. Jennings, “has 
many inheritances; which one shall be realized 
depending on the conditions under which it develops; 
but man is the creature that has the greatest number 





Fic. XIV 


of possible heritages. Or, more accurately, men 
and other organisms do not inherit their character- 
istics at all. What their parents leave them are 
certain packets of chemicals which under one set of 
conditions produce one set of characters, under other 
conditions produce other sets.” 

The Great Abnormals. It is useful to realize how 
many of the greatest figures in history have suffered 
from grave disabilities and apparently congenital 
defects which might have been expected to debar 
them from worldy success. If St. Paul suffered 
from contagious ophthalmia, as the late Dean Farrar 
held; if Napoleon was a victim of Fréhlich’s dystro- 


* Prometheus (1925), p. 62. 


THE ABNORMAL 299 


phia adiposo-genitalis, as the late Dr. Leonard 
Guthrie conclusively proved; if Coleridge was an 
opium-addict, Dostoevski an epileptic, Nietzsche a 
martyr to migraine, and Darwin for thirty-six years 
lived a valetudinarian life (during which he pub- 
lished twenty-three volumes and fifty-one important 
scientific papers )—we should hesitate to regard good 
health and perfect normality as the first of human 
needs. 


CHAPTER XVII: LOOKING FORWARD 


THERE is no department of human activity in 
which psychology may not be of assistance or does 
not promise help. On the other hand, we must not 
too often expect from psychology light upon topics 
which common sense cannot at least faintly illumine. 
Rather shall we find, reinforced and supported on a 
systematic basis, the fragmentary conclusions which 
shrewd and observant people have already reached. 
Before passing to a more detailed account of some 
of these conclusions we may note that the provision 
of a general conception of the way in which the mind 
works is already a great step forward. For example, 
what 1s the place of pleasure and pain as moral in- 
ducements? How far does sustained activity depend 
upon partial and increasing success? How far are 
vivid images useful in clear thinking? Upon these 
and many similar questions the reader will already 
be in a position to reflect with a sufficient background 
of general considerations. 

Man’s Protracted Infancy. We have seen in Chap- 
ter VIII that man, of all animals, has the longest 
period of infancy. He is the most incompetent in 
his early months, and has the most complex social 
environment to which to adapt himself. This is 
partly due to the immense extent of the social heri- 
tage carried by language and institutions, which is 
now quite beyond the attainment of the individual 

3e0 


LOOKING FORWARD 301 


child without the aid of education. The whole effect 
of recent psychological discovery has been to confirm 
the view that the first three years of childhood are 
of overwhelming importance for the rest of life. 
The fixity of early trends, and the acquisition of 
modes of dealing with the environment which are 
transferred and reapplied to an ever wider circle of 
situations, make it clear that in many cases education 
only begins when one of its main tasks has been 
clumsily finished. Doubtless there is a sense in which 
the child’s first and best educator would be the ideal 
mother: but the records of child life in the past, in 
spite of notable exceptions, do not encourage us to 
envy even those of our predecessors who survived 
the cradle; and modern economic tendencies are 
making it more and more necessary to replace the 
guttering light of nature by a galaxy of well-con- 
sidered principles and trained assistants. No one 
readily trusts himself in a car driven by an amateur 
for the first time. Yet we cheerfully leave a much 
more difficult undertaking in the hands of an unaided 
novice. If the modern mother has to be taught 
how to keep the child’s bottle clean, how much more 
does she need help in learning not to poison its mind 
with all those unnecessary fears and desires which 
are occupying the attention of psychiatrists to-day 
(Cf. Chapters X and XV). 

School Education. Further, the study of sugges- 
tion shows that everyone with whom a child comes 
in contact is in these early years, as to a lesser extent 
throughout his life, an educator. Suggestion leads 


302 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


characteristically to imitation in the simplest sense. 
“Whenever the dog barks in the child’s presence, or 
the wind whistles through the cracks, or the kitten 
purrs or rolls upon the floor . . . he will tend to 
repeat the activity. in what appears much like a reflex 
manner.” * But later, so early as the second year, 
this imitation becomes a deliberate activity controlled 
by a desire to copy what other people are doing and 
guided by an explicit idea of what this is. The pro- 
digious exercise in imitation, and the prestige which 
successful imitation thereby gains, are best seen in the 
acquisition of language. The slightest deviation 
from the linguistic conventions of the home circle is 
at once stamped out with a ruthlessness which only 
a student of phonetics, of dialects and comparative 
linguistics, can realize. The plasticity of the child’s 
vocal habits and its zeal in imitation make this the 
golden moment for an initial training in the sounds 
of foreign languages. A similar linguistic oppor- 
tunity occurs during adolescence, when those strange 
aberrations of interest in language for its own sake, 
the counterpart of the universal primitive belief in 
Word-magic, hold sway. The power of concentra- 
tion on what may afterwards be regarded as dreary 
details is at its height between the ages of seven and 
seventeen, but at present, as a rule, little advantage 
is taken of these capacities otherwise than in the 
interests of formal training. 

The Transfer of Training. The great problem thus 
arises, do formal exercises, whether in Latin Gram- 


* O'Shea, Mental Development and Education (1922), p. g1. 


LOOKING FORWARD 303 


mar, in Arithmetic, in Music, or in History, lead to 
mental development which can be transferred to 
other subject-matter? The present conclusion, based 
on methods of mental measurement to which we 
shall return, is on the whole negative. But of course 
everything turns upon the precise way in which the 
formal training is given. If it allows the pupil to 
discover how, why, and when one step in his exercise 
follows from another, if it gives him insight into 
what he is doing, there is reason to expect trans- 
ference. If it does not teach him how to work, how 
to think, how to control his inferences and test his 
conclusions, how to distinguish a general case from 
a particular, how to weigh evidence, and vary his 
procedure with variation of the situation, transference 
is hardly likely to take place, and it is hard to see 
what there would be to transfer. The primary aim, 
in other words, of all formal training is to teach the 
pupil how to handle a varied material so as to reach 
ends which should be clear to him. But a blind 
fumbling without any goal in sight, animated by a 
vague hope of satisfying a largely incomprehensible 
demand, can teach nothing; and to-day unfortunately 
most people have cause to resent the loss of a valu- 
able decade largely spent in such pursuits. A suit- 
able epitaph for many a teacher of the old school 
would be: 
“Here lies One 


Who wasted All his Own time 
And Much of Other people’s.” 


304 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


The Case Against Education. It is hardly surpris- 
ing, in view of the failure of most schools to profit 
by the findings both of common sense and psychol- 
ogy, that the question, “Is school education doing 
more harm than good?” is still periodically raised 
by headmasters of securely endowed institutions, as 
well as by employers and trade unionists. There is, 
however, also the consideration that in some way 
human beings have to be inured to drudgery and un- 
necessary toil, and that in this respect current educa- 
tion admirably fits a man for the world as he will 
find it. But this is not an argument of which educa- 
tionists are proud; and we hear on all sides of the 
difficulty of finding men and women able to take 
responsibility, or to do anything they have not already 
been repeatedly shown how to do. 

Vocational Training. The cure for this, from the 
point of view of the psychologist, is either a formal 
education both wide enough and conducted with suf- 
ficient insight (which involves thinkers as teachers, 
small classes and a consequent tenfold increase in 
educational expenditure), or an adequate and en- 
lightened scheme of vocational training. Any dis- 
cussion of this choice, however, involves social and 
economic considerations which are outside the scope 
of the present work. Are we moving towards a 
general sharing out of unavoidable labor, or towards 
scientific discoveries and technical applications which 
will make highly trained intelligence the first essen- 
tial? 


LOOKING FORWARD 305 


Incentives. In any case the problem of incentives 
in education remains, and here the arguments pre- 
sented by advocates of the vocational school are 
valid. Without some concrete practical problem 
which is in itself arousing interest, the teacher must 
rely upon his own personality, upon comparatively 
feeble indirect inducements, or upon the competi- 
tive spirit. All these are motives which in compari- 
son with a genuine interest in the work itself are of 
low educational value. The most reliable incentive, 
and the one most worth developing, is the pupil’s 
own sense of his growing command of the subject; 
for this springs from the self-regarding sentiment 
which is the nucleus of the personality. Thus a 
practical recommendation of some importance is that 
children should be encouraged constantly to measure 
their capacities not against those of others, but against 
their own at an earlier stage; and in particular to re- 
flect upon the means by which the improvement has 
been brought about. The reasonable confidence 
which this engenders is not to be confused with 
vanity, and is in fact the surest safeguard against it. 

‘Mental Types. One of the points in psychology 
which is of most interest to the teacher concerns the 
recent work on types. The classifications of the past 
have dealt chiefly with intellectual differences, with 
contrasting attitudes to special kinds of objects. 
Thus we get Synthetic and Analytic minds, Intui- 
tive and Logical, Romantic and Classic, Visual and 
Auditive, and so forth. Recently the speculations of 


1 Kerschensteiner, The Schools and the Nation, 1914, chap. vi. 


306 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Jung have received much attention. His classifica- 
tion forms a kind of chessboard with four horizontal 
divisions—sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking 
—and two vertical divisions—extravert and introvert. 
Sensation and intuition are lower level forms of what 
at a higher stage of development appear as feeling 
and thinking. In this way eight main types are 
obtained. But since all these terms are used in special 
senses, and the whole classification is based on a 
theory of the collective unconscious and of primor- 
dial symbols, which have all the air of being emo- 
tive rather than precise forms of speech, the practical 
value of these types is problematic. Moreover, most 
people in the course of a day will find themselves 
fitting into several. Those who employ the terms 
‘extraverted’ and ‘introverted’ in a broad sense as 
equivalent to ‘practical’ and ‘reflective’ might find the 
latter, and the many similar pairs which are already 
in current use, more profitable. 

The ancient classification into the sanguine, melan- 
choly, choleric and phlegmatic suggests a more use- 
ful line of approach. Recent work on the internal 
secretions or hormones, though still in its initial 
stages, makes it probable that not only physique, but 
character also, is closely dependent on what is known 
as the endocrine balance. We dealt in Chapter XIV 
with one of the internal secretions, the adrenalin 
produced by the adrenal glands, but it should be 
noted that there are many other glands, of which 
the thyroid, the pituitary, the thymus and the repro- 
ductive glands are the most important. The sub- 


LOOKING FORWARD 307 


stances which they produce are carried in the blood- 
stream and vitally affect the growth and functioning 
of the tissues. Certain emotions such as fear, rage, 
and pain are known to be directly related to the dis- 
charge of adrenalin, and it seems likely that correla- 
tions may in due course be established for other 
secretions.. Another hopeful line is that which re- 
lates certain types of physique with particular tem- 
peraments and capacities: 


‘‘Let me have men about me that are fat; 
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o” nights: 
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; 
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.” 


Cassius, in the language of Kretschmer * who is chief- 
ly responsible for the alarming vocabulary of this 
subject, was a ‘schizothyme.’? Czsar would have 
desired him to be more of a ‘cyclothyme’! 
Moreover, every classification of types must take 
note of racial and national differences. This is not 
the place to raise the fascinating topic of man’s 
animal ancestry and the traces of pre-anthropoid 
evolution in the human organism as a possible basis 


* The widely read work of Berman, The Glands Regulating Per- 
sonality (1921), is still more open to the charge of uncritical 
schematizations and ad hoc hypotheses than that of Jung, but, like 
the same author’s The Personal Equation (1925), it has served to 
evoke popular interest in endocrine research. 

* Physique and Character, 1925, p. 208. A valuable discussion 
of these distinctions will be found in E. Miller’s Types of Mind and 
Body (1926); an attempt is there made to go beyond the inductive 
enumeration of Kretschmer by tracing the processes in the neuro- 
vegetative system which determine the correlation of the two main 
types of Mind with the two main types of Body. 


308 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


for the differentiation of types; but it may be noted 
that recent work on racial origins has made it prob- 
able that the three chief stems of humanity, the 
White, the Black and the Yellow (Shem, Ham and 
Japheth), are allied, respectively, to the Chimpanzee, 
the Gorilla and the Orang;* and further, that they 
are far more intermingled than we suppose. 

Mental Tests. It is these multiple possibilities of 
type differences in one apparently pure stock which 
make such wholesale methods as are used in mental 
tests of less practical use than is often supposed. The 
devoted labors of the vast army of mental testers are 
slowly laying the foundations for an objective 
method of comparison, of which the ultimate scien- 
tific advantages may be great. It is useful to have a 
standard even if we do not know what it is a standard 
of; since it is always possible that this may be dis- 
covered. And in due time no doubt correlations 
between the intelligence quotient and other mental 
characteristics will be forthcoming. But meanwhile 
the use of such crude methods in place of the more 
traditional and leisurely ways of judging ability and 
desirability is suitable rather for economic and mili- 
tary crises than for a civilization which prides itself 
upon its complexity and its refinement. There is 
much to be said for the quick lunch; but there are 
those who prefer to treat themselves more sympa- 
thetically. In particular, such methods are apt to be 
unjust to the very individuals on whom the future 
may most depend. Even as things are the genius is 


* Crookshank, The Mongol in our Midst, second edition, 1925. 


LOOKING FORWARD 309 


too often regarded as an imbecile; mental tests in 
many cases prove him to be one. But what can be 
tested is unfortunately not always what is most valu- 
able. Few experimenters would deny this, but the 
temptation to make practical social applications in 
conformity with current standards is strong. 

The Future of Communication. The reader will 
have noticed the stress laid upon language in these 
pages. The center of interest in psychology has of 
recent years shifted considerably and the symbolizing 
activities of the mind are more and more becoming 
its main concern; but in many respects the signifi- 
cance of this trend has been insufficiently appreciated 
by workers in experimental fields. The majority of 
intelligence tests, for instance, are essentially tests in 
the handling of linguistic material, though they are 
seldom regarded in this light. Even the best non- 
linguistic mind naturally makes a poor showing. In 
some quarters there is actually a tendency to over- 
estimate the importance of the language factor. 
Many behaviorists in reducing thinking to sub-vocal 
talking overlook the fact that one of the chief prac- 
tical problems of psychology is to distinguish verbal 
from non-verbal thinkers—another, perhaps funda- 
mental, division of the types which are discussed 
above. And even among verbalizers we must dis- 
tinguish those who are at the mercy of their ex- 
pressions from those who are not, a distinction of 
great practical importance in all discussion. There 
are some people, and those not the least eminent, 
who can only be persuaded to change their opinion 


310 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


when they are presented with a formal rearrange- 
ment of their own vocabulary, while others can grasp 
a point, however it is put. In university and adult 
education generally this is of supreme importance, 
and the technique by which men can be delivered 
from the bondage of set phrases in earlier years is 
slowly being evolved. One of the first tasks of those 
who appreciate the bearing of this aspect of the psy- 
chology of thinking on human progress must be to 
make conscious the manifold strivings towards such a 
technique, which are found, for example, in gram- 
matical reform movements, in the study of semantics, 
in new methods of language teaching, and even in 
simplified spelling. 

Another sign of this endeavor is seen in the steady 
decline in psychology of the traditional type of argu- 
mentation in which the disputants revolve patiently 
each in his own closed system of linked definitions, 
and keep in touch with one another only through the 
fact that each is using the same words, though in 
different senses. The freedom with which psycho- 
analysts, behaviorists, and even traditionalists are 
busy coining new vocabularies is on the whole an en- 
couraging symptom, since it at least prevents the 
_ general student who is linguistically plastic from be- 
coming prematurely encaged in too narrow a symbolic 
system. 

But if this happy result is to ensue it is essential 
that men become word-conscious. A similar multi- 
plication of technicalities is occurring in all the 
sciences, and is particularly embarrassing in the social 


LOOKING FORWARD 311 


sciences. It may lead to great difficulties if not to 
general unintelligibility and a sterilizing isolation of 
specialists, unless psychology comes to the rescue by 
inducing a new attitude towards speech based on an 
understanding of what is happening when we speak. 
The important point is to remember that what any 
thought is ‘of? or ‘about’ (its Referent, to use a con- 
venient technicality) and the formulation of the 
thought, must never be confused. Every statement 
is translatable, and translation should form a chief 
part of intellectual training at all stages; not only 
translation from foreign languages into our own, 
though this is at present probably the most valuable 
part of the general curriculum, but also, and still 
more urgently, translation from one formulation to 
another within the bounds of our native tongue. By 
this means we may best become word-conscious, that 
is, become able to look beyond our forms of speech 
to the things we are talking about. A truly sagacious 
Dictator would make it his first business to create a 
Word-conscious Proletariat. 

The Need for Conscious Control. This need for in- 
creased conscious control of the machinery of life is 
even more evident when we turn to the influence 
which modern psychology is exerting in medicine. 
Why have we this sudden universal emphasis on the 
psychological origin of so much mental and physical 
disease? Is it not because the problems of existence 
which a little while ago were so simply solved, have, 
with the increasing complexity of modern civilization, 
begun to put a strain upon the old mechanisms? Just 


312 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


as we should take over conscious control of the Words | 
which have set men chasing after so many unrealities, 
in the same way we must learn to take charge of our 
Minds. Weare beginning to realize, with the aid of 
the doctor, that our neuralgia, our headache, our 
migraine, our dyspepsia, and even our phthisis, are, 
no less than the phobias, the hysterias, the anxieties, 
and the other neuroses which loom so large in the 
contemporary social picture, as often as not ways in 
which we are dodging some awkward situation or 
decision. We have been evading the issue. We have 
lost touch with reality. And again, just as we evade 
the personal problem, so civilization as a whole is 
evading the cosmic issue. Waguely apprehensive that 
the old solutions in their traditional form can no 
longer be squared with the facts, we either look wist- 
fully backwards, or compromise with some morbific 
phantom which we conjure up to screen us from the 
abyss. But we must dare to be wise, and the way 
to wisdom lies through knowledge of ourselves. The 
facts which we can least afford to neglect are those 
which it is the object of psychology to present. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


[The following books have been selected as representative of 
modern psychological opinion in the various fields covered in 
outline by the present work, and as likely to be of service to the 
general reader for the further study of contemporary psychology. | 
Adler, Individual Psychology. 
Baudouin, Suggestion and Autosuggestion. 
Bayliss, Principles of General Physiology. 
Bergson, Matter and Memory. 
Bernard, IJstinct. 
Brett, History of Psychology (3 Vols.). 
Broad, Mind and its Place in Nature. 
Burt, The Delinquent Child, 
Cannon, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Rage, and Fear, 
Child, Physiological Foundations of Behavior. 
Collins, Colour Blindness. 
Collins and Drever, Experimental Psychology. 
Crookshank, Migraine and other Common Neuroses. 
The Mongol in our Midst, 
De Sanctis, Religious Conversion. 
Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct. 
Dorsey, Why We Behave like Human Beings. 
Ellis, The World of Dreams. 
Psychology of Sex (6 vols). 

Fox, Educational Psychology. 
Freud, Collected Papers (4 vols). 

A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. 

The Interpretation of Dreams. 
Gordon, Personality. 
Gregory, The Nature of Laughter. 
Hart, The Psychology of Insanity. 
Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone. 
Herrick, Introduction to Neurology. 

Neurological Foundations of Animal Behavior. 


33 


314 THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY 


Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution. 

James, Principles of Psychology. 

Jung, Psychological Types. 

Koffka, The Growth of the Mind. 

Kohler, The Mentality of Apes. 

Kretschmer, Physigue and Character. 

Lange, The History of Materialism. 

Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism. 

McCurdy, The Psychology of Emotion. 

McDougall, Outline of Psychology. 
Physiological Psychology. 

Mitchell, Structure and Growth of the Mind. 

Morgan, Instinct and Experience. 

Ogden (C. K.) and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. 

Ogden (R. M.), Hearing. 

O'Shea, Mental Development and Education. 

Parsons, Colour Vision, 

Perrier, The Earth before History. 

Piéron, Thought and the Brain. 

Pole, The Philosophy of Music. 

Pratt, The Religious Consciousness. 

Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality, 

Révész, The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy. 

Rivers, Conflict and Dream. 

Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism. 

Rignano, The Psychology of Reasoning. 

Russell, The Analysis of Mind. 

Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialization. 

Semon, Mueme. 

Shand, The Foundations of Character. 

Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, 

Stern, The Psychology of Early Childhood. 

Stout, Analytic Psychology (2 vols). 

Thomson, Instinct, Intelligence and Character, 

Thorndike, The Psychology of Learning. 

Tischner, Telepathy and Clairvoyance. 

Titchener, A Text Book of Psychology. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY B25 


Trotter, The Instincts of the Herd. 
Van der Hoop, Character and the Unconscious. 
Warren, Human Psychology. 

History of Association Psychology. 
Watson, Behaviorism. 
Wilson, A phasia. 
Woodworth, Psychology. 





INDEX 


ABC of Relativity, The, by Rus- 
sell, 162 
Abnormal, the, 279-299 
alternating personalities, 294-295 
calculators, 295-296 
dissociation, 290 
facial asymmetry, 291-294 
hyperzsthesia, 286 
hypnosis, 283-286 
inheritance of genius, 297 
musical prodigies, 297 
suggestion, 280-283 
telepathy, 287 
Abstractions, 175 
Acquisition, instinct of, 121 
Action (see also Movements), 
initiation of, 90 
Activity, purposive, 88 
Adaptation, 4, 8, 12 
Adjustment, 42 
Adler, 2, 276, 277 
Adolescence, 
linguistic opportunity, 302 
sex responses in, 170 
Adrenalin, 241, 307 
Adrian, E. D., 52 
Zesthetic experiences, 198 
Esthetics, 3, 4, 198 
Affections, 19 
Affects (see also Emotions), 8, 14 
Alcohol, effect of, 294 
Alrutz, 285 
Alternating personalities, 15, 294-295 
Amusement, 122 
Anesthesia, 284, 286 
Anesthetics, 286 
Analysis of Mind, The, by Russell, 
I 


Anger, 121 

Animals (see also Apes, Cats, Dogs) 
friendships in, 129 
growth of mind in, 93-131 
comparative method, 93 
unlike man, 35 

Animism, 23, 279, 288 

Anrep, G. V.., 

Anthropomorphism, 125 

Antipathies, 254 

Ants, instinctive behavior of, 94 

Anxiety, 122, 251, 312 

Apes (see also Chimpanzees) 
Kéhler’s study of mentality, 111- 


131 
social tite of, 127-128 
Aphasia, 27, 223 
Appeal, instinct of, 121 
Appetite, 121 


Apprehension, 22 
Approval, desire for, 267 
Argument, 235 
Arithmetic, 303 
Art, works of 
relevance of parts, 202 
response to, 5 
rhythm in, 284 
Ashurbanipal, 160 
Aspects, 24 
Assertion, instinct of, 121 
Association psychology, 141 
Associationism, 9 
Associations, 
free, 274 
of ideas, 229 
Asymmetry, facial, 291 
Atomism, 9, 158 
Atoms, 31 
Attention, 5, 10, 61 
as conscious interest, 201 
in everyday usage, 184 
span of, 199 
to sounds, 210 
Attitudes, 5 
as action, 28 
in thinking, 223 
Attunement, 68, 74, 79 
neurones, 53 
Automatic writing, 15, 290 
Autonomic nervous system (see Sym- 
pathetic nervous system) 
Auto-suggestion, 282 
Awareness (see also Thinking), 57s 
188, 225 
Awe, 122 
Axon, 39, 45 


Babbitt, 221, 229 
Bad, meaning, 159 
Bain, 15 
Baudouin, C., 257 
Baxter, Richard, 2 
Bayliss, 74 
Beautiful, the, 4 
Beauty, 199 
Becher, 288 
Bees, instinctive behavior of, 94 
Behavior (see also Behaviorism, Ex- 
perience), 161-172 
purposive, 78 
Behaviorism, 21-22 
causal view of knowing, 227 
consciousness, status of, 165-167 
historical background, 161 
infantile recognition of expressions, 
141 


317 


318 


Behaviorism, methods of, 167-168 
new vocabularies, 310 
observation, 162-165 
origins of fear, 169-170 
unconditional emotions, 170 
verbal and non-verbal thinkers, 309 
Behaviorism, by Watson, 11, 120, 
138, 164, 165, 169, 171 
Behaviorism and Psychology, by Ro- 


back, 166 
Belief, 92 
and doubt, 252-254 
Beliefs, 27 
Belloc, 5 


Bennett, Arnold, 293-294 

Bentham, 162 

ee des 123, 125, 152, 176, 215, 
2 


Berman, 307 
Bernheim, 280 
Bibliography, 313-315 
Bidder, G. P.; 296 
Binet, 224, 283 
Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, 
Fear, and Rage, by Cannon, 
240, 241 
Body-Mind controversy, 19-47 
Bohr, 2 
Book tests, 289 
Bose, Sir Jagadis, 2, 6 
Brain, the, 
and the mind, 20, 30, 212 
association areas, 58-60 
co-ordination centers, 58 
cortex, 46, $7 
dominance of, 44 
how it works, 56-77 
drainage theory, 70 
expectation, 60-61 
image theory, 67 
lowered-resistance theory, 69 
past, influence of, 62 
retention, 63 
localization of function in, 45 
receptive centers, 57 
Broad, C. D., 21, 120, 177, 288 
Buxton, Jedediah, 296 


Cesar, 307 
Calculators, 295-297 
Campbell, N. R., 217 
Cannon, 240, 241 
Carpenter, 2 
Carroll, Lewis, 219 
Cassius, 307 
Castration complex, 265 
Cats, perception in, 105-107 
Causality, 162 
Cause, 226 
Cell-body, 38, 45 
Censor, the, 17, 273 
Centers, 
of co-ordination, 107 
motor, 90 
sensory, 58 
receptive, 57 
Cerebellum, 43, 91 


INDEX 


Cerebrum, 43 
Character, 
and emotion, 238-255 
defined, 256 
dependence on endocrine balance, 


30 
Character and the Unconscious, by 
van der Hoop, 260 
Charcot, 2, 283 
Chick, instinct in the, 97 
Child (see also Adolescence, I nfancy), 
conquest of speech by, 154 
acquisition of foreign languages, 
302 
interest in sex, 267 
introjection in, 263 
memory in, 137 
Q:dipus complex, 262 
play, 138 
society’s dominion over, 156 
world of, 138, 144-145 
Chimpanzees (see also Apes), 935 
. .246, 259, 308 
Chimpanzee Intelligence and Its Vo- 
cal Expressions, by Yerkes and 
Learned, 128 
Choleric types, 306 
Chronaxies, 52, 75, 259 
Clairvoyance, 279, 284, 289 
Clearing-houses, 42, 46, 56, 59 
Co-consciousness (see Alternating 
Personalities) 
Ceenesthesia, 8, 242 
Cognition, 8, 225, 252 
Colburn, Zerah, 295 
Colds, lack of control over, 281 
Coleridge, 299 
Collins, 91 
Columbus, 217 
Combat, instinct of, 122 
Common paths, 271 
Common sense, 300, 304 
Common Sense and How to Acquire 
It, by Hankin, 296 
Communication (see Language) 
Comparative psychology, 93-131 
Complexes, 
castration, 265 
defined, 255 
(Edipus, 262, 263, 266, 267 
repressed, 17 
ompromises, 267, 271-272, 312 
Comte, 162 
Conation, 7, 8, 31, 188, 252 
Concentration, power of, height of, 


302 
Conception (see Ideas). 
Concept, 13, 183 (see also Ideas) 
in thinking, 231-232 
Conchology, 1 
Condillac, 162 
Conditioned, needs, 87 
Conditioned reflex, 63, 168 
Conditioning, 22, 63, 260 
Conduction of the Nervous Impulse, 
The, by Lucas, 49 
Confidence in self, 305 


INDEX 319 


Configuration, 108 
onflict, 
and emotion, 248 
with reality, 145 
Congenital make-up, 94 
Conscience, troubled, 278 
Conscious control, 16 
Consciousness, 9-10 
assumption of, 163 
elusiveness of, 173 
evolution of, 31 
in dogs, 244 
limits of, 200 
of desire, 136 
of striving, 188 
status of, 165-16 
ultimate modes of, re 
Consciousness, by Marshall, 182 
Conservation of energy, 23 
Construction, instinct of, 142 
Contiguity, 229 
Control, 
conscious, 16 
need for, 311 
mediumistic, 290 
Convenience, 84 
Conviction, 253 
Co-ordination, 
centers, 107 
motor, 90 
sensory, 58 
in thinking, 232 
Cortex, cerebral, 46, 57, 90 
Coué, 280, 282 
Crayfish, The, by Huxley, 132 
Creativeness, feeling of, 122 
Creighton, 2 
Crookshank, F. G., 242, 277, 308 
Culpin, 293 
Curiosity, 121 
in apes, 130 
Cushing, Harvey, 90 
Cyclic definition, 216 
Cyclothyme, 307 


D’Albe, Fournier, 219 
Darkness, fear of, 170 
Darwin, 299 
Daydreaming, 133, 147, 262 
Decision, failure to reach, 278 
Delacroix, H., 234 
Deliberation, and resolve, 254 
Democracy, problems of, 3 
Dendrites, 39, 45 
Derivative needs, 86 
Desire, 
consciousness of, 136, 188 
imagery and, 135 
unconscious, 17 
Desires, 4 
repressed, 270 
Despair, 122 
Development, 271 
Dewey, 30 
Discovery, process of, 113-117 
Discrimination, 66, 89 
Discursive thought, 215, 235 


Diseases, mental, 85 
Disgust, 121 
Disposition, 7, 68, 107, 108 
Dissociation, 290, a9t 
Distance receptors, 179 
Distress, 121 
Dizziness, 209, 246 
Dogs, 47°49 : 
emotional excitement in, 244 
fear of, 170 | 
re epe experiments, 63-67, 81, 84, 


9 

Dostoevski, 299 
Double aspects, 24 
Double language, 26 
Doubt and belief, 252-254 
Dowsing, 210 
Drainage analogy, 51 
Drainage theory, McDougall, 70 
Dreams, 6, 15 

analysis, 273-274 

day, 133, 147, 262 

vividness, 223 
Driesch, 288 
Drivessi8a3 fe 
Dual personality (see Alternating 

personality) 

Dumas, 195 
Durkheim, 157 
Dynamic psychology, 182 
Dyspepsia, 312 


Eastman, Max, 123 
Economics, 3 
Ecstasy, 5 
Eddington, 2, 31, 216 
Education, 
improvement of methods, 2-3 
incentives, 305 
influence of language on thought, 
234 
school, 301-302 
the case against, 304 
vocational training, 304 
Effect, law of, 104, 114 
Ego, 277 
Einftthlung (see Empathy) 
Einstein, 2, 216 
Elan vital, 84, 125 
Elation, 121 
Elementary Nervous System, by Col- 
ins, 91 
Elements, mental, 9 
Elliot Smith, G., 149, 291 
Elliotson, 286 
Ellis, Havelock, 2, 214 
Emotion, 5, 10, 13 
and character, 238-255 
and conflict, 248 
belief and doubt, 252-254 
deliberation and. resolve, 254 
in esthetic experiences, 199 
sentiments, 254 
the unconscious and, 249-252 
unconditioned, 170 
Empathy, 246 
Endocrine balance, 306 


320 


Endo-somatic, 8, 20 
Energy, conservation of, 23 
Engram, 8, 68 (see also Impression) 
Environment and heredity, 297 
Epiphenomenali m, 24 
Equilibrium, disturbance and _  re- 
covery of, 184 
Error, trial and, 103-105 
Escape, instinct of, 121 
Esdaile, 286 
Esquirol, 2 
Essay on Laughter, An, by Sully, 
123 
Ethics, 3, 4 
Ethnology, 3 
Evolution, 31 
Excitation, 48 
Exercise, law of, 104, 114, 117 
Expectation, 60 
Experience, 6 
acquired, 96 
complexity of, 190 
continuity of, 190 
introspection, 193 
localization of, 174, 179-180 
psychological, 4 
uniqueness of, 29 
Experience and Nature, by Dewey, 


30 
Experimentation, thinking as, 227 
Expression of Emotion in Birds, The 

see Kirkman, F. B.) 
Expressions, 
recognition of, 140 
speech development of, 149-151 
External world, our knowledge of, 

203, 214 
Extravert, 306 
Eyeless sight, 286 
Eye-movements, 209-212 


Facts, 
Private, 33 
public, 33 


Faculties, 120 

Farrar, 298 

Fascination, 284 

Fatigue, 6 

Fear, 121 
an unconditioned emotion, 170 
effects of, 238-239, 243 
origins of, 169 
relation to adrenalin, 307 

Feeling, 8 

Feeling-tone, 9 

Ferrier, 2 

Fictions, 
in modern physics, 215-217 
psychology of, 215 

Final common path, 42, 56, 58, 69, 

91, 266 

Fixations, 87, 114 

Flaubert, 173 

Flight, 14 

Food, a fundamental need, 85 

Food-seeking instinct, 121 


Inquiry 


INDEX 


Fore-conscious, the, 16, 270 
Forel, 257, 288 
Foresight, 78 
Forgetting, 6, 230, 250, 269 
orms, 108 
perception, 211 
Foster, Sir Michael, 284 
Foundations of Aisthetics, The, 199 
} into Human Faculty, “by 
Wittgenstein, 224 
France, Anatole, 287 
Freud, 2, 8, 17, 119, 124, 129, 161, 
257, 258-261, 263-266, 269, 
276-278, 284, 288 
Friendliness, 140 
Friendships, 254 
in animals, 129-130 
Frinck, 172 
Fugues, 294 


. Future, prediction of, 289 


Gall, 2, 120 
Galton, 11 
Games, 146 (see also Play) 
Genetics, modern, 298 
Genius, 293 
inheritance of, 297 
Gestalt, 29, 108-110, 114, 255 
Gestures, 28 


Giard, 126 

Glands, 306 (see also Hormones, 
Pituitary glands, Thymus, 
Thyroid) 


Glands Regulating Personality, The, 
y Berman, 307 


Goethe, 89 

Goltz, 2 

Good, the, 4, 159 
Gordon, R. G., 256 


Gorillas, 93, 308 (see also Apes) 
Grammar, 3 
influence of on thought, 236 
Latin, 302 
limitations of, 158 
reform, 310 
Gratitude, 122 
Gray matter, of brain, 45 (see also 
Cortex) 
Gregory, 123 
Group, the, 157 
Growth of the Mind, The, by Koftka, 
110, 137, 171 
Guinea-pig, 139 
Guthrie, Leonard, 299 


Habit, 7 
conspicuousness of, 99 
formation of, 63 
Hall, Stanley, 2 
Hamlet, 198 
Hand, indications of, 293 
Handel, 156 
Hankin, 296 
Happiness, 4 
Hartley, a 
Hashish, effect of, 294 
Head, Henry, 294 


INDEX 


Head, importance of the, 43-46 
Headache, 33, 312 
Heart, the, 19 
Hedonic tone, 8 
Heliotropine, 198 
Hen, 126 
Heredity, 94 
and environment, 297 


Hering, 68 

History, 30 

History i Materialism, The, by 
Lange, 162 

Hobbes, 162 

Hobbs, Jack 


147 
Hollander, Bernard, 120 
Holmes, Gordon, 294 
Hope, 122 
Hormones, 53, 306 
Horror, 122, 275 
Hostility, 140 


‘How?’ 143 
Human Psychology, by Warren, 29 
Huxley, ‘T.. Ho :24,. 132 


Hyperesthesia, 286 
Hypnosis, 6, 200, 283-287 
lack of pain in, 198 
Hypnotism, 15, 279 
Hysteria, 15, 286, 294, 312 


Idealism, 22, 217 
Ideas, 12-13 
as basis of thinking, 221 
association of, 229 
Ideation, 8 (see wise Thinking) 
Illusions, of sight and touch, 205-209 
Imagery, 11 
as retention, 99 
development and uses, 132-134 
types of, 222 
vivid, in thinking, 300 
Imagination, 281 
in apes, 129 
in thinking, 226 
Imago, 264 
Imitation in development of speech, 
155, 302 
Impression, 8 
Impulse, 9, 36-47 
action and scion of neurones, 
36-40 
conflict of, 40-42 
importance of the head, 43-46 
how the brain works, 56-77 (see 
also Brain, the) 
function of spinal cord, 46-47 
Impulses, 54, 183 
Impulsions, 281 
Inactive stimulus, 65 
Incentives, in education, 305 
Incipient action, 247 
teed 
help! essness of, 139 
man’s protracted, 300-301 
perception, 139 
wishes of, 274 
unconscious, 272 
Infatuation, 284 


321 


Inflammation, 126 
Influences, 54 
Inhibition, 47-55 
chronaxies, 52 
during dreams, 273 
inhibited, 65 
theories of, 50-52 
Initiation of action, 90 
Inman, S., 293 
Innate arrangements, 94 
Inquiry into Human Facutly, by 
Galton, 11 
Insanity, 291 
Instincts, 5, 9, 14, 175 
and intelligence, 96 
classification of, 120-122 
nature of, in animals, 94-96 
of apes, 119 
origin of fear, 169 
Institutions as social heritage, 300 
Integrative Action of the Nervous 
raiiie The, by Sherrington, 


44, 
Intellect, 1 oA 
Intelligence, 95, 175 
and instinct, 96 
highly trained, 304 
quotient, 308 
tests, 309 
Intention, 142 
Interaction, 32 
Interest, 5, 9, 82-85 
direction of, in association, 229 
nature of, 87- 88 
Interests, 
consciousness of, 201 
obstruction of, 257 
Integration, 40 
Interpretation, of signs, 212-213 
Introjection, 272 
in the child, 263 
Introspection, 5, 26, 92, 173-201 
distorting influence of language, 
174 
on haa of consciousness, 173- 
hypotheses and abstractions, 175 
localization of experience, 179-180 
mental masquerade, 1094 
process of, 192 
self, the conscious subject, 176-178 
Introvert, 306 
Intuition, 19, 228, 306 
Jrishmen, combativeness of, 123 
Irresolution, a form of doubt, 254 


Jackson, Hughlings, 2 
James, Nae teeae: 14, 140, 195, 238, 


243, 2 
than 
ean 


2, 283 
Jelliffe, Smith Ely, 242 
Jennings, H. S., 29 
Journal of Neurology, 28 
Joy, 122, 251 
Cy G., 125, 276, 278, 306, 307 


ROO 


Kant, 87 
Kantianism, 215 
Keats, 2 
Keller, Helen, 219 
Kempf, 172 
Kerschensteiner, 305 
Kirkman, F. B., 126 
Knowing, 8, 225 (see also Cognition) 
Koffka, 29, 106, 108, 109, I10, 114, 
137, 171 
Kohler, 108, 109 
study of mentality of apes, 111-131, 


259 | 
Kohts, Nadie, 112, 127 
Kretschmer, 307 


La Mettrie, 162 
Lange, 162, 238 
Language, 7, 149-160 ‘ 
as expression of activities, 149-151 
as imitation, 155, 302 
as social heritage, 300 
child’s conquest of, 154 
difficulty of describing phenomena, 
288 
early stages of communication, 152- 
154 
foreign, acquisition by child, 302 
future of, 309-311 
in animals, 93 
influence of, 30, 174 
on thought, 233 
linguistic solution, 31 
new methods of teaching, 310 
of ‘propositional functions, 236 
popular misconceptions, 7, 185 
psychological, 184 
virtues and drawbacks of, 157-160 
word-consciousness, 310 
Language and Thought of the Child, 
_ by Piaget, 142 
Lapicque, 2, 52 
Laughter, 122, 123 
Laughter, by Bergson, 123 
Learning, 105 
process of, 97 
Left-handedness, 291, 292 
Lenglen, 147 
Leuba, 253 
Levels, in nervous system, 56 
Lewes, G. H., 162 
Libido, 8, 84, 89, 125, 275 
Liébault, 280 
Lipps, 246 
Locke, 134 
Logic, 235 
Loneliness, feeling of, 122 
Love, 259, 284 
an unconditioned emotion, 170 
maternal, in hens, 126 
Lucas, Keith, 49 
Lust, 121 


MacCurdy, J., 166, 
Mach, 19 AKG 
Maier,'z0° ) , 
Malade imaginaire, 277 


244, 264 


INDEX 


Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2, 151, 154, 


204 
Manual of Psychology, by Stout, 68 
Marshall, H. R., 182 
Marty, 19 
Masochism, 260 
Materialism, 21-22 
Maternal love in hens, 126 
Mathematics, 3 
most developed form of abstract 
thinking, 233 
Matter, 218 
Maudsley, 2 
McDougall, 23, 248, 288 
drainage theory, 70-74 
list of instincts, 121-125 
Meaning, 9 ‘ 
Meaning éf Meaning, The, by Ogden 
and Richards, 3, 151, 34 
he, by 


Measurement of Emotion, 


_ Smith, 241 
Medicine, influence of modern psy- 
chology on, 311 
Mediumistic happenings, 279 
Mediums, trance, 295 
Medulla, 44 
Meinong, 19, 234 
Melancholy types, 306 
Memory, 5, 175 
biological, 6 
in chick, 102 
in terms of nervous system, 62 
in the child, 137 
the bond of, 181 
Mental Development and Education, 
*Shea, 302 
Mental diseases, 85 
Mental tests, 308 | 
intelligence quotient, 308 
intelligence tests, 309 
Mental types, 305 
Mentality, 
growth of in man, 132-148 
primitive, 141-143 
Mentality of Apes, by Kohler, 112 
TiS.) TI Li ssek 27,1280 
Mesmer, 283 
Metaphors, 16 
Migraine, 312 
Migraine and Other Common Nen- 
roses, by Crookshank, 278 
Mill, J. S., 15, 19 
Miller, E., 307 
Mind, the, 5, 19 
and the body, 19-35 
theories concerning relationship, 
19-2 
and the brain, 20, 30, 212 (see also 
Brain, the) 
evolution of, 31 
Mind, growth of in animals, 93-131 
comparative method, 93 
how it goes wrong, 256-278 
response to stimuli, 212 


state of, 7 , 
study of, starting-point for all 
sciences, 3 


unity of, 189 


INDEX 


Mind and Its Place in Nature, The, 
by Broad, 21, 177 

Minor personality, 290 

witha Bl Mind, The, by Stephen, 


Mitchell? ie 

Mnemic Psychology, ie Semon, 68 

Mongol in Our Midst, The, by Crook- 
shank, 308 

Monism, neutral, 25 

Moods, 249 

Moore, G. E., 19, 234 

Moral inducements, pain and pleas- 
ure ne 300 


Mesa hol 
orbid psychology, 15 
Morgan, C. Lloyd, 31 


Mother (see also Parents) 
predominance of in child life, 262 

Motor co-ordination centers, 90 

Movements, 33, 246 

Muscles, voluntary, 48 

Music, 284, 303 

Musical ear, 80 


Names, 
forgetting, 230 
of expressions, 149, 153 
Nancy School, 281, 284 (see also 
Coué) 
Napoleon, 89, 277, 298 
Nature of Intelligence, The, by 
Thurstone, 83 
Nature of Laughter, The, by Greg- 
neh 123 
Needs 
esnaiticned 87 
derivative, 86 
fundamental, 85 
of apes, 119 
parasitic, 87 
Nervous Patient, The, by Culpin, 
293 
Nervous system, 1o (see also Brain, 
Head, Neurones, Spinal cord 
Sympathetic nervous system) 
diagram, 41 
Neuralgia, 312 
Neurasthenia, 66 
Neurogram, 68 
Neurological Foundation of Animal 
Behavior, The, by Herrick, 91 
Neurology, 22, 26, 27, 31, 32, 35 
yb keyan eee and interaction of, 


Neatonksnbloey: 27 

Neuroses, 15, 257 

New World Vistas, by Wood, 218 

Newton, 89 

Nicod, 219 

Nietzsche, 160, 257, 299 

Nocuous stimuli, 198 

Non-verbal thinking, 309 

Notions, 13 (see also Ideas) 

N iregyhizt, | se, 156, 297 
dience, 2 

Ob ien Berea of, 162, 164 


323 


Obsessions, 281 

(Edipus complex, 262, 263, 266, 267 

Ontology, 1 

Orang, 308 

Organic resonance, Lange-James hy- 
pothesis, 238 

criticism of, 242 

Organic sensations, 13 

Organic states, 271 

Organ- inferiority, 277 

Origin and Development of Moral 
Ideas, by Westermarck, 4 

O’Shea, 302 

Outline of Psychology, An, by Mc- 
Dougall, 74, 120, 248 

Ownership, feeling of, 121 


Pain, 31, 92 
as a moral inducement, 300 
expression of, 140 
nature of, 198 
relation of adrenalin to, 307 
Pairing, instinct of, 121 
Palmists, 293 
Parallelism, 24 
Parasitic needs, 87 


Parents, 
compromise of child’s wishes with, 
272 
instincts, 121 
(£dipus complex, 262, 263, 266, 


267 
use of regressions, 269 
Passions, 19 
Past, influence of, 
brain, 62 
Patriotism, 254 
Pavlov, 2, 63, 168, 284, 285 
eapein on dogs, 63-67, 81, 84, 


in working of 


Perception, 4, 199 

and imagery, 135 

beginning, 190 

Gestalt School in, 108 

in cats, 105-107 

infantile, 139-141 

sensations as, 203 

simple form of thinkings 226 
Performance-times, 113 
Personal equation, the, 220 
Personal Equation, The, by Jung, 307 
Personality, 256 

alternating, 15, 294-295 

bearing of asymmetry on, 293 

minor, 290 

teacher’s, 305 
Personality, by Gordon, 256 
Perspective, pene of, 208 
Phenomenon, 
Philosophical Studies, by Moore, 234 
Philosophy, critical, 87 
Phlegmatic types, 306 
Phobias, 15, 312 
Phthisis, 312 
Physics, 1, 3, 4, 17 

cyclic definition in, 216 


324 
Physics: The Elements, by Campbell, 


217 
Physiological Psychology, by Me- 
ee eee 74 

ysiology, I, 79 
Physique and Character, by Kretsch- 


Piaget. jis nda 
Piéron, 26, 27-28, 204 
Pituitary glands, 306 
Planck, 216 
Play, 133, 138, 146 
world of child, 144-145 
Pleasure, 5, 92 
as a moral inducement, 300 
consciousness of, 188 
expression of, 140 
Pleasure-pain, 8, 9 
Pleasure-unpleasure, 195-197 
Poetry, 284 
Political opinion, 287 
Politics, 3, 159 
Polo, Marco, 217 
Postures, 28 
Pre-conscious, the 
scious) 
Prediction of future, 289 
Prejudice, 92 
Presentation, 8, 226 
Primitive man, 131 
mentality, 141-143 | 
revivals of emotion in, 228 
Prince, Morton, 68, 249 | 
Principles of General Physiology, by 
Bayliss, 74 pl 
Principles of Literary Criticism, by 
Richards, 233 
Principles of Psychology, by James, 
243 
-Private facts, 33 
Processes, 183 
Prodigies, 
mathematical, 295-296 
musical, 297 
Projection, 245-247, 272 
in the child, 263. 
Prometheus, by Jennings, 298 
Propositions, in language, 236 
Proprioceptors, 91 
Psyche, 29, 123, 264 
Psyche, the, 2, 20, 28 
Psychiatrists, modern problems, 301 
Psychical agent, 77 
Psychical research, 15, 20, 178 
Psycho-analysis, 161, 200, 256, 257, 
275, 276, 310 (see also 
Freud) 
Psychological Healing, by Janet, 283 
Psychological Principles, by Ward, 
137 
Psychology, 
and neurology, 26 
animal (see Comparative psychol- 
ogy) 
genetic approach to, 6 
logical approach, 234 


(see Fore-con- 


INDEX 


mathematical approach, 234 
method, 34 
morbid, 15 
reasons for study of, 1-5 
subject-matter of, 5-6 
terminology, 7 

Psychology, by ME ast 10 

MA 


Fsucheleay and Politics, ivers,’ 

161 

Est chology of a Musical Prodigy, 
The Révész, 


DY: 156 
Psychology of Early Childhood, The, 
by Stern, 139 
Psychology of Emotion, The, by 
MacCurdy, 166, 244, 264 
Psychology of Reasoning, The, by 
Rignano, 227 
gens ke of Religions Mysticism, 
The, by Leuba, 253 


Psychology of the Emotions, The, by 


Ribot, 198 

Psycho-neural parallelism, 24 

sychosis, 7 
Psycho-therapy, 2 
Public facts, 33 
Purpose, 78 

and foresight, 78-79 
Purposive activity, 88 
Purposive behavior, 78 


Rage, 
an unconditional emotion, 170 
effects of, 243 
relation to adrenalin, 307 
Rationalization, 276, 287 
Reality, conflict with, 145 
Rebound, following inhibition, 54 
Recency, law of, 104, 114 
Receptive centers, 57 
Recognition, 58, 79, 211-212 
a complicated process, 213 
Recollection, 62 (see also Memory) 
Referent, the, 311 
Reflex, 
conditioned, 63, 168 
scratch, 47-49, 51 
spinal, 46 
Refractory state, 51 
Regression, 138, 268, 271% 
Relativity, 
ethical, 4 
theory of, 216 
Repetition, 99 
Representation, 13 (see also Ideas) 
emotional, 228 
in thinking, 224-229 
Repression, 
a hindrance to recollection, 138 
and transformation, 257 
Repression, in (Edipus complex, 267 
of unconscious activity, 250 
of wishes, 270 
Reproduction, 85, 124 
Repulsion, instinct of, rar 
Resemblance, in thinking, 224 
Resolve, 92 
deliberation and, 254 


INDEX 


Responses, 105 
modification of, 98 
Retention, 62, 79, 96, 99 
Reverberation, emotional, 238 
Révész, G., 156, 297 
Rhythm, a 
Ribot, 2, : 
Richards, I. A., 3, 233 
Richet, 283 
seca iaren bine 291 
ignano, 22 
Rivers, W. H, R., 2, 162 
Roback, A. A., 165 
Roberts, Morley, 22 
Robinson, Fb pen Harvey, 2 
Romains, Jules, 286 
Russell, Bertrand, 16, 162 
Ruth, Babe, 147 
Rutherford, 2 


St. Paul, 298 
Sanguine types, 306 
Schizothyme, 307. 
Schools and the Nation, The, 305 
Scorn, 122 
Scratch-reflex, 47-49, 51 
Séances, 295 
Selection, 57 
Self, the, 174, 175 
as a mnemic bundle, 181 
the conscious subject, 176-178 
Self-abasement, 124 
Self-observation, 164 
Self-realization, 4 
Self-regard, 254 : 
nucleus of personality, 305 
Semantics, 310 
Semon, 68 
Sensation, 
Sense of 
Max, 123 
Sense-data, 189, 205 (see also Sensa- 
tions) 
Sensitiveness, 89 | 
Sensory co-ordination centers, 58 
Sentiments, 254 
Sex, 15 
a fundamental need, 85 
adolescent response to, 170 
child’s interest in, 267 
complexity of, 260-261 
Freudian theory, 258-260 
in apes, 130 
(Edipus complex, 262-267 
Shakespeare, 198, 294 
Sherrington, 39, 44, 49 
Shock, 191 
Sidgwick, 287 
Sight, 
eyeless, 286 
illusions of, 205-209 
Signs, interpretation of, 212-213 
Simplified spelling, 310 
Sleep, 6 (see also Dreams) 
artificial, in hypnosis, 284 


8, 9, 176, 203 
umor,, The, by Eastman, 


325 


Coué’s view of, 282 
effect of, 273 
Smith, Whately, 241 
Social life of apes, 127-128 
Social or gregarious instinct, 121 
Social psychology, 157 
Social Psychology, by McDougall, 
124 
Society, 
a fundamental need, 8 
dominion of, over child, 156 
Solipsism, 217 
Soma, 20 
Sorcery, 142 
Sorrow, 122 
Soul, 19, 178 
ounds, location of, 210 
Space, Time, and Gravitation, by Ed- 
dington, 216 
Speech (see also Language) 
conquest of, by child, 154 
importance of development of, 149 
part of imitation in, 155 
Spinal cord, 42, 46 
Spinal reflexes, 46 
Spirit, 19 
Spiritualism, 22 
Squint, 201 
Stephen, Karin, 152 
Stern, W., 139, 155 
Stimulus, 
conditioned, 284 
inactive, 65 
Stout, 6, 14, 68, 100, 1or 
Striving (see Conation) 
Structure and Growth of the Mind, 
by Mitchell, 26 
Subconscious, the, 16 
Subject-object relation in thinking, 


225 
Subjection, feeling of, rar 
Sublimation, 257, 261 
Submission, instinct of, 121 
Sub-vocal talking, 21 
Success, 74 

dependence of sustained activity 

on, 300 

Suggestion, 92, 279, 280-282 
auto-, 282 
leads to imitation, 301 
post-hypnotic, 287 

Sully, 123 

Superiority aim, 277 

Surprise, 122 

Swimming, 91 

Symbol-systems, 215 

Symbols, 
primordial, 306 

Sympathetic nervous system, 28, 44, 

48, 92, 228, 239-242 

cranial section, 239 
sacral section, 240 
sympatheticotonic influence, 240 
vagotonic influence of, 240 

Sympathy, 118 

Synzsthesis, 5, 199 


326 


Synapses, 38, 50, 69 
Syntax, 175 


Technicalities, multiplication of, 310 
Teleology, 78 
Telepathy, 279, 286, 287 
Temptations, 55 
Tender emotion, 121 
Tensions, 28 
Terror, in apes, 130 
Thalamic Ns 294. 
Thalamus, We 29 
Thinking, 8, 788° <aen also Thoughts) 
as sub-vocal talking, 21 
methods of, 221-237 
association, 229-231 
attitudes, 223 
concepts, 231-232 
ideas, 221-222 
images, 222-223 
influence of language, 233-237 
representation, 224-229 
typical failures in, 229-231 
verbal and non-verbal, 309 
vivid images in clear, 300 
Thorndike, 104, 107, 120 
cle a and dss Brain, by Piéron, 
26.99) 2 
Thoughts, €; ay tues also Thinking) 
discursive, 215, 235 
Thurstone, 83 
Thymus gland, 306 
Thyroid gland, 306 
Touch, illusions of, 205-209 
Trace, 68 
Trances, 290, 295 
Transference, 105, 274-277, 303 
Transformation, repression and, 257 
Translation, 
part in intellectual training, 311 
Traube-Hering waves, 208 
Trial and error, 103-105 
Troubled conscience, 278 
Truth, 84 
Types, 
human, 4 
Jung’s chau of, 

Types of Mind and bay by Miller, 
307 
Typewriting, 90 
Unconscious, the, 15-18, 

249-252 


103, 175, 


INDEX 


collective, 306 
Jung’s theory, 278 

mechanisms of, 270-272 
Unconscious, The, by Prince, 249 
Unconscious, The, by Stout, 68 
Understanding, 5 
Universals, 13 en also Ideas) 
Universe, riddle of, 214 
Unpleasure, 188 
Urban, 234 


Vaihinger, 214, 220 
Valuation, by Urban, 234 
Van der "Hoop +» 260 
Van der Mensbrugghe, 109 
Verbal imagery, 223 
Verbal thinking, 309 
Visualization, 180 
Vocational training, 304 


‘ Volition (see also Will, the), 8 


Wallon, 195, 215 

Walshe, 91 

Ward, James, 137 

Warfare in the Human Body, by 
Roberts, 22 

Warren, 28 

Warts, cure of, 281 

Wasps, instincts of, 95 

Water-diviners, 210 

Wha Riper e he 120, 138, 161, 163, 
164, 169-171, 259 

Wells, H. G., 219 

Westermarck, 2, 4 

White. rats, 131 

‘Why 142 

will, el 8, 90, 175, 280, a81 

Wilson, » A. Kinnier, 28 

Winking, 292 

Wish-fulfillment, 136 

Wishes (see also Desire). 

repressed, 270 

Wittgenstein, 224 

Wohlgemuth, | 197, 198, 276 

Women, man’s attitude towards, 275 

Wood, James, 218 

Woodworth, 105 

Word-consciousness, 310 

Word-magic, 153, 302 

Writing, automatic, 15 

Wurzburg School, 221 


Yoga system, 294 





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